I found this kind of difficult to answer precisely. Our budget is 60K per year and what I consider core costs are around 25 K. That includes taxes, insurance, utilities, and food. However, if we really had to go into austerity mode, we could cut the beer and wine out of the food bill, we could reduce our tax bill by reducing our withdrawals from our accounts. We could maybe get down to 20K in survival mode. I don't really see that ever happening. I answered the survey with 2X. Most of our discretionary spending is travel, charity and recreation.