TLDR: buy cheap charisma and int gear when you can afford it, so long as you have enough plat to spare for the spells below and some simple components for rune and bind wound and stuff. Even the cheap gear will work well at higher levels, at which point you can go solo/group better items for yourself without paying or you can farm plat and buy the gear you want.
Gear for enchanter can be very cheap to still be very effective. I'd ignore the charisma robe advice and get an int/mp robe when you can afford it though. Pretty efficient charisma gear (cheap per point of charisma) is available for most gear slots (ears (opaline), neck (gypsy medallion), face (JC or incandescent), fingers (JC), wrists (JC), legs (drakehide), boots (loam) primary (rod of insidious), secondary (crude Stein)). A few slots it's better to get into gear for imo, like robe (tola), range (charisma hard to get at all) arms (gatorscale), waist (braided cinch, giants reminder), head (runes cowl). Use
http://wiki.project1999.com/Category...nter_Equipment and look at the different slots for the pieces that look the best and are the cheapest; it's some work, but it's a good use of time imo.
Velious might have better gear options for cheap still, be it even if not at least velious gear pushed down prices on a lot of these basic enchanter items. It might take a few thousand plat and some questing before you're not wearing any cloth anymore, but it's still easier to get reasonable gear for a chanter than most other classes. The stuff I recommend above lasted my first chanter on p99 to 60 (and then some).
Spells? Not even half of them are "required" imo. Here are ones I wouldn't want to be without to cover solo and group play:
1 - lull (for when you have spread-out mobs and don't need a long lull, this saves mana), pendril's animation (use pets to XP until you get charm), shallow breath (start with), minor shielding (start with)
4 - color flux (very short stun duration but still lets you get off a mez after using it if you have a clicky to refresh spell gems), gate, invisibility, mesmerize (i use this or the level 16 AOE mez for 95% of my mezzing all the way to 60), juli's animation, suffocating sphere (finishing off stuff solo for full xp - more efficient than nukes), tashan
8 - bind sight (omg such an amazing spell to scout with in dungeons), chaotic feedback, illusion: gnome (lets you see through walls and maneuver more easily in tight quarters), lesser shielding (always nice to upgrade shielding for a few hp and ac, most importantly for magic resist), mircyl's animation, root (I use this root spell exclusively until PE, still use it sometimes once I get PE when I know I don't need a long root, and don't stop using it permanently until Fetter), see invisible
12 - bind affinity, charm, choke, memory blur (not too useful at lower levels but sometimes you still want to clear aggro on something instead of zoning or camping or whatever)
16 - breeze, invisibility versus undead, mesmerization (you'll resist your own mesmerizaton pretty often with shielding and endure/resist magic, and you become immune to it at 56 or something, and you often can move away from enemies and cast it without risk of hitting yourself in groups or after a stun), quickness (for groups or hasting pet when you need to kill something tough), rune I (since you can't heal (even bind wound is better than troll illusion imo) it's important to avoid taking as many hits to your HP as possible, plus runes give you extra buffer to survive when you get charm breaks or resists), sanity warp, shielding
20 - calm (awesome, awesome, awesome), color shift (possibly the best overall stun), endure magic (getting hit by your own ae mez is bad, and so is getting feared, stunned, rooted, snared, charmed, etc. by NPCs), sympathetic aura, tashani
24 - alacrity, beguile, chaos flux, major shielding, rune II, tepid deeds (don't use it much at lower levels but 40+ it is quite effective for fast cast and low-ish mana - it's my favorite slow even at 60 for most fights)
29 - augmentation (saves on mana in groups), clarity, illusion: air elemental (long-duration levitate with no component cost), illusion: water elemental (long-duration enduring breath with no component cost)
34 - anarchy, greater shielding, radiant visage, rune III (my favorite rune, keep it up 24/7 unless you have cleric buffs+heals, and even then jaspers are cheap so use it when you have mana... useful even at higher levels if you don't want to pay peridots for rune IV or V)
39 - cajoling whispers, celerity, resist magic
44 - arch shielding, boon of the garou (help those warriors proc their aggro weapons - tell not to play in first person and suck it up), color skew, discordant mind, rune IV (need it just for tough fights esp. soloing named stuff but don't use it regularly instead of rune III imo), shiftless deeds (much stronger slow at max than tepid but very slow cast and higher mana cost), tashania (it's a quest to get it but it is worth it)
49 - adorning grace, allure, berserker spirit (short-duration mini-rune - important for soloing something nasty), blanket of forgetfulness (aoe mem blur is great, though if it doesnt blur everything they'll just assist back onto you again), dazzle (nice long mez for situational use, such as keeping a caster NPC mezzed while you med up to be able to handle him), group resist magic, paralyzing earth (lasts so long! expensive and slow-casting compared to root though, so use root if you don't actually need 2+ minutes of root or if the thing will break early anyway cause of level/resists/getting nuked), swift like the wind (i generally prefer casting augmentation line if possible though)
And by 50 hopefully you have it all figured out anyway, or at least can afford all the spells you think you might want in the same vein as the suggestions above. A big part of why chanters get so strong at higher levels is because they can leverage low-level spells to accomplish a lot against higher-levle targets. Root, mesmerize, mesmerization, tepid deeds, low-level stuns, mem blur, calm... tash levels up but is cheap to cast... those are pretty much your most important spells besides charm and runes, and since they're mostly low-level their mana cost is a drop in the bucket by 50+ (let alone 54+ with c2 and ToT) and you'll hardly ever fizzle them and they cast fast, etc.