What do you do to tighten your belts?

I've been the one paying our bills for years now. Since I was the one always home, but since we moved into the new house, it stresses me out! Since we moved its like the house is eating our savings up! Yes, its all stuff we needed like blinds for the windows, a snowblower, a lawnmower, weed wacker, edger & all that good stuff. We needed to build a bedroom in the basement too, so that ate up a good amount.  Then there are those things that you need to pay for like insurance. Its higher because we are in our own home instead of in the townhouse. Taxes are going up soon too & that stresses me. We also spent a good amount on canning stuff since this was the first year (jars, processing pot & all the accessories needed), but that will save us $$ in the long run this year because I won't have to buy pickles, salsa, diced tomatoes, stewed tomatoes & so on.

I have recently gone through what we have been spending the most on & it comes down to groceries & "household" things. So I have told my husband we need to stop eating out (his lunches mostly) & we need to cut way back on our munchy foods like chips, pretzels, nuts & what not. Even the beer needs to be cut back (way back).

Besides these items I've been thinking about what else I could cut out. We don't have balances on credit cards. I've already tried to refi my truck unsuccessfully to get a lower rate. I already got us on a lower cell phone plan. I think we can ditch our home phone because we never use it & it costs us $20-30 a month. I'm tied into my cable due to a contract, so I can't do much there though I will look to see if we can get a cheaper plan.

I stay home with my girls 9/10 times. I usually only leave the house to go places when we need groceries or for Dr's/Chiropractor appointments. So I don't get tempted to buy things we don't need or need gas as often since I have a gas guzzler (Trailblazer). Though I do make my trips back to IL to visit family every so often, but thinking this is going to slow down now.

On the plus side, I don't have to worry about our utilities bills being too high. It costs us the same amount here in this house as it did in the townhouse (the house is at least 2x the size 3x if you include our basement as the townhouse) because we got put in geothermal instead of your standard heating & air conditioning. I also have no gas run to the house. Everything is electric! Its great except when the power goes out, but we haven't had to really deal with that at all. We flicker during bad storms & have lost power 1 time for an hour due to a scheduled outage (they were fixing something up the road).


So what do you do to save money?