Goat Notes

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!