The old advice was simple. Retire debt free. Pay off the house, cut up the cards, walk into your sixties owing nobody anything.
Lovely idea. Almost nobody does it anymore.
Debt among older American households has climbed steadily for decades. Mortgages that used to be paid off by 60 now run into the seventies. Credit card balances follow people into retirement. And a growing number of retirees are carrying student loans, frequently for a child's education rather than their own.
The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances tracks this, and the direction has been one way for thirty years. Retiring with debt is now normal, not a personal failure.
So the useful question is not "how did this happen." It is: what actually happens next?
And the answer is far less apocalyptic than most people fear, with two specific exceptions that genuinely are dangerous.
Let's go through which debts matter, which ones mostly do not, what collectors can and cannot take from you, and the order to attack them in.