October budget report: Do you want to cut your expenses by one third

No really! Do you want to do that?
First let me ask you some questions. Do you have any kids? No? Good. Are both husband and wife working? Yes? Good. then this technique is suitable for you.
When you reach your office tomorrow, see your boss the first thing ( I know how this ruins your day, but is this day more important than your one-third budget?) and when you see him/her tell her how well do you like your current job-profile ( doesn't matter that you don't, in fact the more you dislike it, the better, just don't tell it to the boss). Then ask him if you can have some more of it...the work. At this point your boss may become suspicious about your ulterior motives...salary hike, replacing him, promotion etc. gently alleviate his fears. Just explain that you currently have a lot of free time on your hands and you'd like to get some work done in it. Hopefully this will result in your being swamped with work.
Once you have it try and get into a position where you have some impossible to meet deadlines. That's it! Believe me, these simple steps will lead to a healthy bottom-line.
No more time for grocery shopping - no expense on food, no time for meandering into that mall and spending money on fashionable clothes, after-all you'd be sweating it out in the office on weekends you will barely manage to keep up with the laundry. While you would be busy analyzing that data, you wouldn't even realize that the new batman movie has just released in the movie theaters. You get my drift...
Well, this is the long and short of what happened to us this month...except for asking for work. We booked our tickets to Europe in the beginning of this month and after this ~2000$ expense it seemed that our monthly budget with shoot up to an all time high this October, but then we started getting busier, and busier. Since we had no time left after work, we didn't go shopping, and didn't spend money. So apart from those tickets, which have to come from our separate travel budget, we had finished this month considerably lower than our targeted budget. Although this could be a cause for celebration, I'm not really happy. I guess, our time is as important as our money, sacrificing one may result in saving the other but I don't want to go down that road. I'd rather hover around our targeted budget and have some more time to myself and hubby. Hopefully November would be more balanced!
Our savings had increased a bit this month. Now we have about 96.66% of our 10% down payment. While we are still far from actually buying a house, it feels kind of nice to have money for it. I want to pull that number up to 20%, so that we can escape the mortgage insurance and also be more in control of our mortgage payments...in time of course.