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Retiring with debt used to be considered reckless — the kind of thing financial planners warned against for decades.

 

These days?

 

It's just normal.

 

About 69% of baby boomers carried some form of debt in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, the most recent year available. If you're one of them, you're not the outlier. You're the majority.

 

Now, that doesn't mean retiring with debt is harmless. It just means the old assumption — that you clear your debts before you clear out your desk — doesn't reflect how most people are actually retiring anymore.

The numbers vary a lot depending on how you slice them.

 

The median boomer household — the true middle, not skewed by a few outliers — carried $62,450 in debt in 2022.

 

The mean, or average, was far higher at $147,122, pulled up by households with unusually large balances.

 

Age matters too. Younger boomers, ages 58 to 66, were more likely to carry debt (75%) than older boomers ages 67 to 76 (62%) — and carried more of it (median $73,610 vs. $43,000).

 

However you look at it, these numbers are historically high. Median debt among households headed by people 65 to 74 has more than quadrupled since 1992. For households 75 and older, it's more than SEPTUPLED.

Housing is the biggest piece. In 2022, 38% of boomers carried debt secured by their primary residence — mortgages and home equity loans — with a median balance of $116,000.

 

Credit cards are just as common: Another 38% carried a balance, with a median of $3,000. That figure sounds modest, until you remember credit card interest rates routinely exceed 20%. A balance that small can still grow fast if it's not paid down.

 

Vehicle loans and education debt round out the picture. Education debt in particular tends to carry the largest balance outside of housing — often a sign of Parent PLUS loans or graduate borrowing that never fully got paid off.

During your working years, an unexpected expense has options: a bonus, overtime, a side hustle, simply working a bit harder for a stretch. In retirement, most of those levers disappear right as new expenses — home repairs, medical bills, car trouble — tend to show up more often.

 

That's the real risk of retiring with debt. It's not the balance itself so much as what it competes with. Every dollar going to a fixed debt payment is a dollar that can't flex when something unplanned happens, and in retirement, something unplanned eventually always does.

If debt is following you into retirement, a few moves make the biggest difference:

 

Pay down high-interest debt first. Credit cards are almost always the most expensive balance you're carrying, and the most likely to spiral if left alone — even if it means trimming discretionary spending for a stretch to get there.

 

Consider delaying Social Security, or working a little longer. Every year you wait to claim past your full retirement age adds roughly 8% to your benefit, up until age 70. Extra working years do double duty: more time to save, and fewer years your savings ultimately need to stretch across.

 

Get a second set of eyes on it. A fee-only financial advisor or a nonprofit credit counselor can help build a debt payoff plan that's actually sized to your real numbers, not a generic formula.

Carrying debt into retirement isn't a moral failing, and it isn't automatically a crisis. It's a math problem — one that gets harder to solve the longer it's ignored, and considerably easier with an actual plan behind it.

 

If retirement is close and you're still carrying a balance, that's worth addressing now, while you still have some of the income-side flexibility retirement takes away.