Engaging in paid employment after claiming retirement benefits may be an important avenue for individuals to work longer as life expectancies rise. After separating from one's career employer, individuals may engage in paid work to stay active or to supplement their current level of retirement savings or both. Individuals who choose not to work after claiming may be expressing their preference to stay retired, perhaps because their retirement income is sufficient. However, the decision to work after claiming may be driven by the lack of retirement planning and insufficient savings, while the lack of post-claiming work may reflect the inability to find adequate employment opportunities. We use administrative records merged with panel data from several surveys of public employees in North Carolina to study the decision to engage in paid work after claiming retirement benefits. More than 60% of active workers plan to work after claiming benefits, while only around 42% of the same sample of individuals have engaged in post-claiming paid work in the first few years after leaving public sector employment. Despite this gap, stated work plans are strongly predictive of actual post-claiming work behavior. Our final analysis uses self-reported measures to gauge the financial well-being of our sample in the early years after leaving career employment.

This chapter analyzes how low- and moderate-income retirees utilize retirement savings, and how financially fragile they are, relying on survey data on public employees in North Carolina. We investigate whether retirees make systematic errors when they manage their assets so as to maintain their standards of living, and whether there are notable differences in financial management skills across subgroups. We also ask whether financial literacy is positively associated with lower rates of committing such errors and, and whether low-income households have lower levels of financial literacy leaving them likely to make poor financial decisions. We show that many retirees have no emergency cash, and one quarter maintain high-interest debt while leaving low-return funds in retirement saving plans. Suboptimal debt holding is associated with lower household income and lower financial literacy.