Not the post I'd expected to make next, but an important one.

Contributing towards free resources with cash has one inarguable side-effect - one has less cash afterwards.  This isn't an acceptable net result for me, for several reasons.  Firstly, I don't earn a lot of money, and I'd rather not look for a less congenial job in order to achieve some modest improvement.  I'm not saving enough for my liking now.  Moreover, I see hard times ahead and more need to scrimp and save than before.  Finally, there are straight questions of both goodwill and freedom involved - the more financially secure I am, the less likely I am to need to touch other people for their hard-earned, and the more able I am to tell the government/my employer/whoever to go to blazes, if they start behaving as if they belonged there.  Since relative self-reliance is presently an option for me, it would be a really bad idea to do anything to undermine it.

There are limits to this sort of thing, and very stringent ones, because financial narcissism is a disease illimitably creepy and always morally fatal, and it is one to which some perfectly decent traits in libertarians' worldview render us dangerously liable.  But that is another discussion, or several discussions, for other occasions.  For the moment I want to focus on one modest and essential part of the project: funding every commitment I make as I go along.  In other words, every part of this challenge has to leave the resulting lifestyle at least as sustainable for me as the one I went in with.

( A sad story of an unsustainably charitable friend )

So, coming firmly down to earth, how am I going to pay for all my new commitments to pay for that lovely free stuff I've been lapping up?

One simple economy will pay for more charges than I've yet managed to identify.  Except to sound out a new place for some social gathering, in future I shall only dine in Indian restaurants when in company.  My own inordinate curry-cravings must otherwise be satisfied either at the work refectory, or by my own hands.  This will have the happy side-effect of forcing me to learn many more curry recipes than those few I've already mastered.  I estimate this will save a good £150 a year.

So with a last ceremonial butter chicken and saag aloo at the admirable Punjab restaurant in Covent Garden, the resolution is sealed, and my formerly-free subscriptions are now funded!

In which I begin to put my beliefs systematically to the test.

An easy and fairly painless one, first.   I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous.  Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial.  The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.

The question turns out not to be an easy or a simple one at all, which is one of the reasons (or excuses) for my not having answered it very well previously.  The easy and simple question I'm trying to answer in this challenge is: what am I going to do about it, right now?

For each problem I solve, I will allow myself one short post about one of the many issues behind this phase of the challenge, and the various questions, answers, and bewilderments in which it involves me.  All feedback, as ever, will be gratefully received.  Likewise, if any of my researches or mis-steps should later prove useful to anybody else, this challenge log will have served at least one of its principal purposes.

My immediate list of projects I believe I ought to be funding, but am not:

• Dreamwidth, via paid membership.  (I believe the LiveJournal community deserves my support in other ways: I don't feel any urge to support its administrators financially.)  All I need to do here is sort out a technical issue with my card payment - hopefully possible this evening.
• Wikipedia.  Yes, I have problems with it.  No, that hasn't stopped me making extensive use of it.  So...
• Project Gutenberg.
• The Center for a Stateless Society at the Molinari Institute - a political resource, here considered purely as a spring of much freely-given education and mental profit.
• Diane Duane, for the freely webbed version of her The Big Meow.
• Spybot Search and Destroy, that  most excellent labour of love against the evil malware.

Several other things from which I benefit, and for which I am grateful, but which I presently expect not to be funding, will also come up for consideration.

'Ere we go...