Mark Dolliver: Hoping for Retirement

Financial advertising often urges people to calculate how much money they’ll need to retire. The theory is that this will prompt them to save and invest more—and, hence, to make greater use of the advertisers’ services. Alas, a survey conducted for AARP finds that such planning isn’t reliably a catalyst to action.

Conducted among working households in which nobody has the old style of defined-benefit pension plan, it found 43 percent have begun trying to figure how much they’ll need to salt away.