Most of my life I was single and lived on my own. Then I got married in my late 50s, covid hit, inflation hit, etc. Needless to say the cost of living is a ton higher now, than it was in 2018.

While my work involved being quite detailed, and at times I can get very detailed oriented (such as planning trips), I generally hate doing boring and repetitive things like tracking expenses, budgets, etc. Never, ever, did one while working. Had money put in 401K plans and savings and kind of knew if I was spending too much to dial it back and it worked well.

Long way of saying in retirement I've been trying to get a better grip of expenses and figured out before food, clothing, maintenance costs (house,car, etc.) our kind of minimum monthly expenses are $4,200.

That includes insurance (homeowners, car, health, umbrella), taxes (income, property) utilities, cell, streaming, etc. It probably is a bit high since last year my taxes were higher due to pulling money out of an inherited account so the income was higher than what we actually spent.

So call it $4,000 a month. Then put back food, clothing (pretty low), medical expenses, house/car maintenance, etc.
I would say on the low end we could get by on $6,000 a month excluding any large house issues. Obviously if we had to cut back further we could always downsize the house, etc. but the basic costs of items just goes up and up and utilities companies are raising rates 5-10% a year, insurance companies, etc. All of which outpace most peoples' increases in income unless they have a large investment portfolio and that goes up.

$20K? $30K? $40K? A year? No way. Maybe if you lived in some rural place in Kentucky or somewhere. And we aren't big spenders. No expensive cars, etc. We eat out more than most but that isn't even in that $4,200 a month budge I mentioned.

I can recall about 10 yrs ago figuring I could easily live off $3K a month but that was pre-covid and before every company decided to take everything they can get from consumers.

Rich