Pay down mortgage or save for retirement?

[fidgiegirl]

Given your age, if it were me, I'd aim for this:

1) Refinance the mortgage if possible. Even though rates are no longer at rock bottom, I would bet you can do better than a 5.xx% rate still. Or, think about moving. Do you plan to stay in your home indefinitely? Could you get anything comfortable in your neighborhood but for less borrowing? If you sold your home, would you expect to get more than what you owe? More rhetorical questions than anything, but feel free to answer them if you want . . .
2) Pay off the cc and car and possibly the medical debt (or maybe just stick to payment plan since it is 0%) and then start rolling those $$ into retirement savings.
3) Keep current on the student loan, but don't go overboard on paying it off. It would be interesting to know the outcome of if you are better off submitting to some garnishment of SS or by keeping with the payment plan. One of the recent Marketplace Money episodes had a good listener question about student loan forgiveness v. income-based repayment. I wish I could remember which week it was. Maybe if you poke around in the podcast archives the descriptions would tell you enough to know which one it was.
4) Put any extra available $$ toward retirement. It's an "put on your own mask before putting on that of others" kind of scenario in my mind. You might be ok with working until 70, but you may not be able to. I think the time to beef that fund up as much as you can is now.

You might also consider cross posting this in the MMM forums. I hate to recommend that but you won't be torn from us if you do it. There are a lot more people over there and many of them are very well versed in investing. You gotta have a tough skin, though. I've never been brave enough, myself.

ETA: Here's that student loan podcast (not the whole thing, you might have to hunt around to where within the hour they talk about it): https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/...234231719&mt=2