Did budget (roughly) when we were still working. Had to work up an estimated retirement budget when we started doing (rather erratically) retirement planning in our late 40's. Used very conservative #s since guessing what your utilities, etc., are going to be in 15 yrs is pretty much like throwing a handful of darts at a dartboard, LOL.
First couple of years in retirement we traveled quite a bit which is expensive, so I did have to keep an eye on monthly expenses. I simplified it after a while to estimating our traveling costs per day, on each trip. That helped to give me a sense of how inflation was (or was not, in recent years) happening. We don't travel as much now but I still like to get out every 6-8 weeks and get away for a week. No point in living in one of the most beautiful areas of the world and not taking advantage of it, right? I'm thankful I can still enjoy driving.
Spouse's pension has a COLA so amount has crept up over the intervening 12 years. I took SocSec at 66 and had three small pensions that activated at age 65, so that increased the monthly income. When MIL died, Spouse decided to continue receiving her distribution from the taxable acct he inherited, which was another increase.
Although the portfolio lost money last year, it gained enough over the bull market so that both accounts are still higher than when he inherited the taxable acct, despite the monthly distributions we take. That amount is strictly extra in our budget, and since our CFP firm manages it on a tax-friendly basis, most of it is tax-free anyway.
We leave his IRA account untouched, and it has grown substantially. Although we live in a HCOL area, with the portfolio, a SFH that has a very tiny mortgage (we freed up some equity when rates were down to 2.75%, as we did remodeling during the pandemic), and LTCi policies, we are fairly confident we've managed to minimize financial risk as we age. We have no children, and although my family lives nearby, they have their own much bigger financial issues so it wouldn't be fair to ask them for financial help.
I did tell my spouse the other day I'm continually reminded of a funny T-shirt message I saw long ago: "If I got up in the morning and nothing hurt, I'd think I was dead". Old age might be catching up with us sooner than I thought!
LOL