Pete the Planner asks, ‘Can ambitious people feel fulfilled in retirement?’

As you know, we discuss retirement planning fairly regularly on the IBJ Podcast, but in retrospect it’s been a little one-dimensional. We almost always are focused on how to hit a particular number—the amount to have squirreled away that will allow you to maintain your current lifestyle during retirement. There’s a little bit of wiggle room in our definition of lifestyle, but we’re usually talking about creature comforts, travel, entertainment, family obligations and health care. What we have not addressed is ambition. If you’re a company founder, serial entrepreneur and/or C-suite executive, the ambition that drives you will not vanish the day you decide to give up full-time work and hit the pickleball court. Ambition is part of your mental and genetic makeup, and you need to account for that itch while planning for quote-unquote “retirement.” IBJ personal finance columnist Pete The Planner, aka Peter Dunn, is obsessed with the topic of ambition, and it’s frequently something host Mason King finds himself wrestling with. So in this week’s edition of the podcast, they’re fleshing out how retirees can harness their ambitions while widening their definition of the term to help others. They also have a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of ambition, people who use ambition in a constructive way—with several local examples cited by Pete—and those who are focused on their own interests. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.