Don't be afraid to ask for money. Money often means respect and with respect comes self-confidence. If you are free, it means that you consider yourself so bad at programming that people will not even consider you. You'll learn nothing. You'll always be the "free guys" that everyone will laugh at. The one that gets to debug stupid things or have to work on impossible projects. If you don't need that money, give it to a charity but please, ask for money.
To add to this, remember people want your services. They want to feel warm and fuzzy when they finally pay you and their product is working exactly how they imagined (or how they require). If they never pay you, they will take a long time to be satisfied.
Yeah, people usually want to pay for services they think are valuable. Right now, I'm getting tutoring in one of my classes. My tutor was nice enough to offer to do it for free, but I definitely wanted to pay him. He was doing something for me that I considered valuable, and even though I'm a college student who does not have a whole lot of money, I wanted to compensate him for the tutoring.
