“How much will I need for retirement,” my friends often ask me. “Am I going to run out of money?”

If I had a penny for the number of people who have asked Google “Is £200,000 enough to retire on?” I would have enough to do my own search for “is £1 million enough to retire on?”

Life expectancy has been on a fairly steady crawl upwards (not counting the Covid years). The average for women is 82.6 years, while men live to be 78.6, according to the Office for National Statistics. And the longer you live, the further your money needs to stretch.

But while averages give you an idea of what to expect, they are just averages — and actually pretty poor predictors of how long you will really live. And even if you knew for certain that you would spend 25 years in retirement, it doesn’t make knowing how much you would need to fund that retirement any easier.

This is because people often overlook an important fact about later life: you don’t spend the same amount each year. You need to consider the different stages of retirement and what your spending is likely to be in each.

The first stage is for holidays, home improvements or even relocations; it’s the time when you are spending money and are still healthy.

What follows is often a period when you are done with the bucket list and content to spend more time at home, so your expenditure may not be as high.

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The third and most expensive stage is when you may need care.

Everyone will be different but spending in retirement is typically U-shaped. I am working towards a 40 per cent (you are healthy but spending); 20 per cent (at home); 40 per cent (care needs) spending split.

Preparing for these stages is difficult, and we are destined to make the wrong assumptions. Making it even harder is the question of the type of pension you have. While some pensioners are lucky enough to retire with a defined benefit (or final salary) pension, where you get a guaranteed income each year, based on how long you worked for an employer, more and more workers will retire having to rely on a defined contribution pension, where the amount you get depends on how much you saved and how your investments performed.

Anyone with a defined contribution pension will not only be responsible for saving enough into it, they will also have to decide the best way to draw on that pot. Changes introduced nearly a decade ago mean that you now have the freedom to choose from several options, rather than being forced to buy an annuity.

Giving savers a choice should be applauded but it also leaves them open to making the wrong decision. The stakes are high and so are the chances of getting it wrong. Draw too much too early and you risk running out of money, but being too cautious could mean you lead an unnecessarily austere life.

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How you plan to draw your pension will also affect how you invest your money in the lead up to retirement. Will you be buying an annuity, which pays a set income in exchange for a lump sum, or going for the drawdown route, where you take out your money gradually? Each require a different approach. Your five-year pre-retirement strategy needs to reflect your post-retirement thinking.

I can’t reassure my friends that they will have enough money to last throughout their retirement, but I tell them this: give as much attention to the pay-out phase as the pay-in phase. You spend more than 40 years building up your pension pot, don’t let a lack of planning when it comes to drawing on it scupper your retirement dreams.@JohannaMNoble