You may recall that in a recent post, I said that I’m going to quit my job in 90 days after a three-month trial run of living off only The Hub’s salary. This may be a bit ambitious, but that’s the goal for right now.

Welcome to Mission SAHM Part II: Our plan for trimming the budget.

With April almost under our belt, I’m pleased to report that things seem to be going relatively well. Since the month isn’t over yet, we haven’t totaled our exact expenses, but so far we’ve come in under budget each week at the grocery store and have greatly reduced excess spending. I’m taking this to be a positive sign.

One of the ways we’ve been doing this is by following the tips from Crystal Paine, a.k.a. Money Saving Mom, and her 31 Days to a Better Grocery Budget series. We’ve set our grocery budget and despite the fact that I don’t usually have many coupons or anything other than the goal of keeping the total at or below our weekly amount, we’ve actually come in below budget each week so far.

This isn’t so say it hasn’t been a challenge, and a bit of an adjustment.  It may mean that the weeks we have to buy diapers may be weeks where we eat a few vegetarian (or beans and rice) dinners, but it can be done.

Following Crystal’s advice, I’ve only been using an envelope with enough cash for a week of groceries and a calculator at the store. My wallet and all other payment options remain at home, thus forcing me to stick to the budget by eliminating the option to go over by using my debit card to pay.

I have to admit that the first day I tried it, I felt a little dorky walking around with a calculator totaling up every item I added to the cart, but once I saw the difference it made in what I spend (because it forced me to think about the need for every item), I stopped worrying about it. Now I feel cool with my little calculator and the dollars I’m saving.

The next thing I’m going to do is record every single dollar that I spend on a note pad that I carry in my purse. I wish I could say that I already started doing this (as I had planned) since April 1, but unfortunately we haven’t made it a habit yet.

We’ve done this exercise before and it’s quite helpful in keeping you accountable for every dime you spend. It also helps me think twice every time I think about buying something because I have to admit that I’m a bit competitive and I feel pretty awesome when I can go days without having to record anything in my notebook. Especially when my stretch beats The Hubs’ stretch. It’s easy to fall out of the habit of doing this, I mean, when you’re juggling a baby who is ready to eat, a full car of groceries and trying to make it home before melt-down time, who wants to dig through their purse, fish out a pen and a notepad write down what you just spent? But I believe it will be a great help in keeping spending under control, so I will be very disciplined about doing it.

In addition to the above, we’re going to investigate our options for reducing our car insurance rates. My vehicle is almost paid off (only 6 more months of payments left) and when it is, it may be more cost-effective for us to reduce the amount of coverage. Especially since it won’t be driven nearly as far when I’m no longer working.

We’re also going to look for ways to reduce our monthly cable, phone and utility bills. For example, we currently have a bundled phone/cable/internet package, but we literally never use the phone. I honestly don’t even have any idea what our home phone number even is, so why are we paying for this service?

Also, once I’m no longer working, it won’t be essential to have a data plan on our cell phones so we’ll scale that back to something much less expensive. Our plan technically expires in July, but I have a sneaking feeling that if we’re willing to sign a new contract with them, they’ll let us do it a few months earlier.

That leaves our mortgage as our biggest expense. Unfortunately, with the housing market what it is, to sell our house now would likely mean taking a loss. We would be incredibly lucky to even get what we paid for it, but there may be a way to reduce this expense.

We’re going to investigate the cost to lease our home and rent something closer to where The Hubs works. It’s questionable if this will save us any money at all though. Especially when you consider that our home is in need of improvements in order to get it into a condition that would be appealing to renters. Taxes would be another concern. But it’s still worth exploring so that’s what we’re doing.

What about you. What do you do to save money? Is there any technique you think we should explore?