I’m shocked to find that later life has become such a complicated place.

I am a simple person who wants to know what’s coming in in later life and what’s going out. I work around fixed income from wages and pensions and I spend on mortgages, food and a few other things like Lady Lucy.

Does it make sense to buy the following apps to keep track of my expenditure? Does it work to benchmark yourself against typical pensioners?

A lot of people have an annual income in mind that they want their pension to provide — hit that and they can retire. For the average pension saver, that’s £48,868 a year, according to a new study by Royal London, a pensions provider.

We are bad at spending it seems. I am not quite sure what good is, but apparently I should be spending by now like someone at the highest point of my grin, at the beginning of my smile/old age. I’ll be back spending when I get to the end , it will be expensive when I’m old but not much fun (my hospital tell I cost £360 per night before drugs when guest of the NHS).

But below’s a guy who’s telling me his job is to make the second half of my life better than the first. With him are a number of people including Billy Burrows, follow Kevin Hollister who helps us budget at www.guiide.co.uk and there’s some bloke from Chancery Lane RIP (retirement income planning). The Chancery lane is just round the corner from where I live so I’m guessing that all this stuff should be coming in handy.

Except I really don’t have problem spending money so long as I know what I’ve got coming in and come in it does. When I turn my pot into a pension (working on it) , the danger of having huge amount of pot will have gone away.

Turning from the enthusiasm of the Retirement Practice comes next.  Moira O’Neill is I think having a bit of a laugh at the expense of all the people she comes into contact with. There’s a lady called Emma Sterland who turns out to be chief financial planning director at wealth manager Evelyn Partners and says

“My experience tells me the time spent enjoying your savings in retirement is much longer than the time spent in a care home, so it’s a different pattern of spending. We might want to be staying in nice hotels and flying long haul from age 60 right up to 80 or so — but perhaps only spend three or four years in a care home.”

In my experience, trying to predict your later life is very hard. My parent is now in the dying zone where most of the dying is going on in care homes, it’s not something you pre-book.

My Tribe Insurance Brokers are good at quoting the costs for a 60 year old of medical insurance and Laing Buisson tells the FT how much we should put aside for residential care. It’s all very expensive. I’m rather of the opinion that the last thing elderly people want is to buy a whole of life insurance policy to pay for the inheritance tax their unspent pension pot could leave their vulnerable loved ones.

Royal London’s pensions and tax expert Clare Moffat says: “Options could include whole-of-life policies, where a payout is made whatever age the person dies at or joint life second death plans where there is a payout made on the death of the second person in a couple, up to age 90. These policies tend to have lower premiums.” For a non-smoking couple aged 80, insuring a sum of £300,000 on a 10-year term with Royal London would cost £5,828 a year.

It is a difficult and unfortunate dilemma that faces the wealthy person who has a pension pot and no certainty of what is coming in.

But we should be relieved – as we are in the pension end game – that there’s an insurance solution to de-risk us.

I’m not quite sure what we are learning from these articles in posh papers. But I’m pretty sure that I should be spending a lot more time with financial advisers as they seem the only people capable of advising me on how to get hold of these important products. And without these budgeting apps and insurances and the investment plans that we freed from being pensions , I am sure I will have a miserable last 30 years.