Running two isolated systems on one machine - one for personal fun, other for banking and secure storage?

Hello,

Hope this is the right board for this. I am not a newb to Linux, however I currently run Windows 10 primarily and do some Torrent within it. I know this introduces security risks.

I bought a scanner to begin OCRing and archiving all my legal docs and mail. I would ideally like to scan these documents in a secure environment, and encrypt them. I have 1TB of storage in a redundant RAID setup on this desktop. I also want to securely bank.

I still want to be able to torrent, and also run a Plex server... but I don't want this to compromise my security. If I dual boot Windows and Linux, then my understanding is I'll need to reboot every time I want to switch between scanning documents and streaming...

Would it be secure to run some sort of VM server in a secure Linux host environment, and if I do this, can I have both "machines" running independently without risk of "cross contamination"? Would this allow me to securely torrent and stream while simultaneously scanning and storing documents in the other environment?

Or is there a better way? I work as a developer, and have used VM's in the past, but not run a VM server myself as of yet.

Thank you!

UPDATE 5-8-2022: Hey everyone - after reading your suggestions, and factoring in the 3060Ti that I recently bought for AI-related workloads, I've decided I'm going to install VMWare vSphere Hypervisor on my desktop, and then 2 or 3 different isolated VM's on that.

I am also going to setup one or more virtual LANs for different "roles" and consequently VM's, and keep them on different VPN connections.

Thanks for the advice everyone! I looked into Qubes, and I would have gone that route, but I have a feeling that will end up being way more cumbersome with the GPU passthrough, and realistically I think separate VM's on different VLANs will be enough.