That's one way of looking at it LTA.
LTA, in you post you profess to be immune to any financial difficulty come hell or high water and I would really like to know, if you care to share, how you are able to pull that off. I am mostly in the gambling camp, as revealed above, and might get walloped. Even my government pensions might not be so secure. If government moves to hand out money hand over fist (as would appear to be the current tack), how long can governments maintain payments to pensioners? Perhaps the only hope is for COVID-19 to kill all the pensioners.
I have started writing a response to you several times Mukhang pera and deleted what I wrote each time. I can't find an easy way to answer your question without having to go into too many specifics and too much detail.
The basics are that you must earn more than you spend. By that I mean using something like the Rule of 3s which I try to follow in regards to income. That says, you spend 1/3 on expenses, 1/3 on discretionary spending and leave 1/3 for saving/investing. Most retirees come nowhere near that for various reasons including not being very good at managing their expenses and spending too much on discretionary spending. It requires an entire paradigm shift from how money is handled while still working to how it is handled when retired.
For example, someone who comes home from a long day of work may be too tired to cook and either order-in food or go out to a restaurant. In retirement, some people expect to continue doing that to the same degree even though they no longer have the same need to do so. It's a simple example of continuing habits that were applicable to another lifestyle. This same continuing of habits applies to all kinds of things to do with what people spend money on.
People get told if you earn $100k a year when working, they need to have $70k per year when retired. I say that is absolute nonsense. You reveal you have an indexed pension of $38k and then note, 'not enuff to live on'. I say poppycock. You can easily live on that amount if you choose to. It won't be enough to follow the Rule of 3s I outlined but it will certainly be enough to live on if you have no debt when you retire.
Something like 25% of Canadians go into retirement still owing on a mortgage or paying rent. The two biggest expenses anyone has are food and shelter. There are ways to spend less on food some as simple as reducing order-in food or going out to restaurants so often that I mentioned above. Others are simply about learning to be a smarter food shopper. No one in my opinion should be going into retirement without a home bought and paid for. No rent, no mortgage. Eliminate that and you reduce your income requirement significantly.
People struggle with the question of 'how much is enough' in terms of capital and/or income. They struggle because they always come at it from one perspective. First they start listing their expenditures and then they look to see how to generate that much income and how much capital they will need to generate it. Then they discover they will need a LOT of capital to actually generate that much income UNLESS they start drawing down their capital (savings). They then become the people who when times are bad, have a problem. They can see their savings suddenly being worth less on paper because they are in stocks and that since the MUST withdraw to eat, their savings are going to have to actually diminish in real terms because they must withdraw and turn the paper loss into a real loss.
But it is possible to approach the whole thing from a different perspective. Shift the paradigm. Instead of starting from what are my expenses and how much income do I therefore need to generate, it is entirely possible to change the start to, 'how much income can I generate and how much therefore MUST my expenses be limited to.'
When you approach it from that perspective it changes all kinds of things in your thinking. Spending does NOT dictate income, income dictates spending. Let's suppose I only have 38k annual income. I have a home bought and paid for, I can't retire without that, it's a rule I have set for myself based on how I intend to manage my retirement. My income will not ALLOW me to do otherwise. Income dictates spending. I can't afford a mortgage or rent, that's non-negotiable.
So I have my home and $38k. Now I decide I am going to use the Rule of 3s (you can other rules if you want, here is a popular one:
https://www.thebalance.com/the-50-30-20-rule-of-thumb-453922)
So I take my $38k and divide by 3 which then tells me I MUST maintain my expenses around $12,600 per year. That's all my fixed expenses including groceries(biggest fixed expense). If that means I cannot afford the 'all bells and whistles' TV package or fasting in the world internet package, so be it. If I must learn to shop for groceries wisely enough to manage it on $400 per month, so be it. Income dictates spending. So I learn to be frugal.
But I'm not suffering. I also have $12,600 of discretionary spending. So I can go out to a restaurant if I want or buy a new shirt just because I happen to really like that one I see in the store. I also have $12,600 that I can save each year and it along with my discretionary funds mean that if I have some unexpected real expense come along like needing a new furnace in the house, I have the money to pay for that without having to worry about it.
Obviously, the more income I have, the more of each category I have but there is almost NO reasonable number that is so low that I cannot still enjoy life. There are plenty of retirees who would be more than happy to have an income of $38k per year and that brings us to perhaps the biggest paradigm shift of all for our society. Money does NOT buy happiness. Studies have shown repeatedly more wealth simply create more wants, not more happiness.
When people think they need more money than they have, it is to feed wants and what they should really be asking themselves, 'why am I not happy with what I have and how can I be happy with what I have. What's missing, it isn't money once I have enough to meet my actual needs.'
Someone who has some index linked pension income, perhaps some GIC's that they take the income from and portion in thirds in the same way, a home they own and who learn to live on the income they have, has no need to worry themselves with the stock market or drawing down savings, etc. The object of the game is in the end to learn to live a happy life and that is not dependent on money.
https://www.livescience.com/10881-global-study-money-buy-happiness.html