So I have AT&T U-verse and am teaching myself networking and am wanting to mess around in creating my home network and set up static IPs for my devices. I know how to set them up, but I guess AT&T is saying that they have to allocate the static IPs....pretty much they are saying I have to pay them so they can say ok I can use the IP addresses from xxx-xxx-x-10 to and then depnding on how many I want to have depends on how much I pay. This makes no sense to me. Why should I have to pay my ISP for static IP address, from my understanding those are things I set up myself at will?!?!?!

Its not just something you do at your end.
If they reserve a static IP for your use, nobody else can use it.
While with a dynamic IP its only taken/occupied while your computer is on.
So with IPv4 address starvation as well as the ISP has to administer static addresses, its not strange that you have to pay a bit for static IP.

I understand and that makes total sense, but if I am setting up a static IP on my own home network, or if I set up a secondary router with a different IP and then set up static IPs on that network and subnet, then I shouldn't have a problem and not have to pay correct?
For example, I have the router from my ISP, but I don't care for it., so I connected my personal router to my ISP provided router. If my ISP router is 192.xxx.x.xxx with the subnet of 255.xxx.xxx.xxx and the IP addressed for the machines connect are all dynamic.
Then I have my personal router with the IP address of 175.xxx.x.xxx which is always this IP, then I can setup static IPs for the machines on this network and subnet without having to go through my ISP?!?!

you need to go through your ISP for internet access, that;s the service they provide.
yes, you can (but shouldn't) use any ip address you want, and send stuff to the internet,
the problem is returning traffic, internet routs will send the traffic to the real 175.*.*.*
network and you will never see the traffic again, you will also be block holing yourself,
you will never get to any internet service in that network range that you "borrowed"

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