This, so much this. We're going to need to go through our Amazon order history too.
One idea I'll float (very carefully) with the wife is that we cancel Amazon prime and see how it goes for 60 days. We do get diapers and wipes from Amazon but we can bulk order that and save the impulse purchases. I'd also like to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet by my mindless purchases. And if we desperately need prime after that trial we can always re-start.
It's fine to look for money saving ideas like this, but a scattershot approach will have only limited success in really cutting spending.
What you and your spouse need to do, first, is understand precisely how much you spend and what you spend it on right now. All of it. There is no substitute for creating a spreadsheet with spending categories (mine has 53), then going back through the credit card statements and checkbook and allocating the spent dollars to a category. You could do it by the year or by the month (I do mine every month when I get the credit card bill and find that to be the most convenient). Just by doing that, you will find many, many places where money is trickling through your fingers without actually improving your life or moving you toward your goals.
Even in the days when our income was larger than yours, we still knew exactly where every dollar went. We did not "budget" or artificially limit our spending in any way. In fact, we lived pretty darned well. But tracking our spending naturally kept it in check and ensured that we were getting real value from every dollar spent. It would have been very easy to spend a lot more if we were not paying attention.
A secondary benefit of knowing our spending is that we could determine precisely how much we needed to retire and when we would reach that point. One of my goals for retirement was that our standard of living would not change (at least as far as money controls that), and it hasn't. We still do exactly the same things we did before we retired (except work) and spend almost exactly the same amount of money.
PS - for Amazon, we charge everything to our Amazon credit card, because we get 5% back. When the bill comes, I print out the sheet of charges, call up the Amazon order history and, for each charge, allocate to the proper spending category in my spreadsheet. ALL of our other spending is funneled through a single credit card and when that bill arrives, I print out and allocate every charge. Then, it is just a matter of accounting for the few checks I have written and the bank account charges for things like the electric company, which won't take a credit card. We spend very little cash.
Still would get us ahead to sell them and trade in for a minivan.
one never knows, it's possible....
