Earlier this week I posted about the notion of being frugal vs. being a spendthrift vs. being a tightwad or a cheapskate. Many of you posted comments to let us know that, like me, you fall happily into the frugal category, but some of you are still struggling to give up your spendthrift ways. In fact, one reader posted this question in the comment box, which I thought was such a good question that I turned it into today’s blog posting:

Q: I’m trying to work towards frugal, but I’d honestly rather keep being a spendthrift than become a tightwad. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I read more and more frugality bloggers–how do you avoid becoming miserly when you focus so much on saving money?

A: I don’t think you have to jump right from spendthrift to tightwad, just as I wouldn’t suggest that you make a major change in your habits all at once. This will surely lead to resentment on your part and, most likely, failure in your attempt to adopt more frugal ways. Instead, I would suggest that you ease yourself into ways you can save money so that over time, you can comfortably go from spendthrift to frugal without feeling too much pain.

Here are some ways you can do that.

* Make an effort to meal plan
I can’t stress enough how important meal planning is to saving money. On its most basic level, when you meal plan and know what you’re having for breakfast, lunch and dinner–and you stock your kitchen accordingly–you will be less tempted to eat out. Once you start cooking at home, you’ll start saving. Sure, your grocery bills will go up–that’s to be expected. But I’ll bet that soon enough, you’ll see your restaurant spending going down.

* Don’t go shopping when you’re bored
We used to call this “shopper-tainment,” and it’s something we got in the habit of doing when we lived in Michigan. You see, in Michigan it’s pretty much winter eight months of the year, and you can cross-country ski and sled only so much. On days when we couldn’t figure out what to do with ourselves, we went to Target or the mall. Bad habit to get into and one we brought with us when we moved back East. If you find yourself driving to the mall or walking around downtown, just because you’ve got nothing better to do, find something else you can fill your time with. This isn’t to say that you can’t ever go shopping for the pleasure of it, but try to limit it to when you actually need something. Or ease yourself out of “shopper-tainment” by going less frequently or consciously buying fewer and fewer things when you go out. Remember, acquiring more “stuff” isn’t very green either. Hopefully, soon enough you’ll have gotten rid of your desire to shop as your hobby.

* See what regular expenses you can get rid of
When we decided to live more frugally, one of the first things we did was go through our regular bills and see what we could do without in order to start saving money. Initially, I got rid of my online subscription to WeightWatchers.com, because I just wasn’t using it anymore. We asked our kids to each give up an online gaming site that we were paying $5 a month for them to use but, frankly, they weren’t using. About six months later, we sat down again and reviewed our bills to see if there was any other fat we could cut from our spending budget. This time around we decided to stop subscribing to HBO (once the Sopranos and The Wire were over), which saved about $20 a month. We did, however, keep our Tivo and Comcast on Demand subscriptions. Another cut we could make was to the second landline in the house, which I used for business purposes. Since I was using my cell phone most of the time, why bother paying for that second line just for the convenience? Cutting that landline added up to $750 in savings a year. And as I mentioned in that earlier post on frugal, spendthrift or tightwad, we saved up to pay off our car, so we could free up $400 a month.

These are three simple things that you can do to become more frugal. Let me know if these make sense and, if you end up adopting any of these changes, how they’re working out for you.