Student loan debt, skyrocketing medical bills (with or without health insurance), high costs of living and a myriad other assaults on the bank account are all taking their toll. In fact, Americans owe more than $4 trillion. Debt seems a normal way of life for many—or, as Charles Dickens wrote in Little Dorrit, "they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out." Lest this habitual condition of insolvency, as Dickens puts it, threaten retirement, workers are trying to lower the levels of their debt so that they might have funds to save for the day when they simply can't work any longer. LendingTree investigated whether it might be easier for people to dig out from under debt in some metropolitan areas than others. It relied on data from a sampling of LendingTree's own users' credit reports, the American Community Survey 2017 five-year estimates from the US Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Consumer Law Center. LendingTree found that it's easier in some places to make progress paying down debt. In other areas, the dice are, so to speak, loaded against the debtor. It then ranked the 50 most populous metropolitan areas based on Its findings. The slides above detail the 10 cities LendingTree says are the worst for paying off debt. READ MORE: Top 11 best states for retirement on a fixed income Student loan debt harms retirement, says AARP 10 states with the highest average student loan debt