Grave concerns: can the internet tell me when I'm going to die?

http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2014/apr/17/pensions-savings

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When will I die? It's not the kind of thing I like to think about very often, but when it comes to forward planning, a ballpark figure could be useful. This is the thinking behind the pensions minister's latest announcement that retirees will be given an idea of their life expectancy as part of the advice they get about what to do with their pension fund.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of my life expectancy could be greatly exaggerated. Might one company tell me I need to eke my pension out to age 100 while another suggest I could actually afford to blow it on a car (possibly something more modest than a Lamborghini) to get me around for my remaining few years?

Alan Highams of Annuity Direct, says yes. "There are very different estimates of longevity depending on who it's based on: general population, people who buy annuities, company pension members, with variations by gender, health issues, postcode and wealth – and then allowing for possible future improvements in longevity," he says. "You could justify saying a 65-year-old might be expected to live anywhere from 10 to 30 years depending on which segmentation you use."

Highams recommends I try the Lifetime app from consultancy Towers Watson. This asks me for my date of birth, gender and where I live, and puts my life expectancy at 88.3 years.

The calculator on the Peoples Pension site takes far fewer details and suggests I will live to 89.9 – so that's around 18 months I might not have cash for if I take Towers Watson's estimate too literally.

Confused.com delves a bit deeper into my state of mind – and how many vegetables I eat – and determines I could live to age 89. (I may have slightly overestimated up both the amount of exercise I do and the number of carrots I eat.)

On Spence & Partners life expectancy calculator I assume that my lifestyle gives me "light mortality" – I live in the south, don't do manual work, am still deluding myself about how many vegetables I eat. It puts my life expectancy from here at 47.8 years – but that only gives me until age 86, you rotters.

Did I learn much? I suppose they have focused my mind on the fact that I could have a good few years of retirement to fund myself through. However, without knowing how much data the individual insurer has and how closely its estimate is attuned to my circumstances, it is hard to know how much attention I should pay to it.

Also, knowing how long I might – and it is still very much a "might" – live for, doesn't really help me work out what to do about it.

Lastly, I try the "countdown to death" calculator at invidion.co.uk which claims to be based on actuarial tables. It tells me I have 15,344 days, 14 hours, 30 minutes and 3 seconds left (in a handy pop-up box I could refer back to throughout the day). That gives me to roughly age 80. Maybe they found out about the vegetables, but the site notes: "As mortality tables are used to predict average death rates and trends, the best you can say is that you have a 50% chance of living longer than the average or a 50% chance of having a lesser lifespan. The figures are generally accurate for large groups of people, but less so for individuals."

Which seems to be a bit of a flaw in the whole plan.