Kevbo can always be relied on to share the most negative extreme. But there's a grain of truth, in that some people will not progress to majors, or get stuck in a bad place with a lot of seniority at a dead-end or bankrupt employer. So there's risk for sure.

But given the known retirements and your age (still pretty young) your potential opportunity is better than most of us who are older ever had. But we are getting to the point where you want to pull out all stops to catch the retirement wave. It would be ideal not to have debt, but it would be a reasonable risk to incur debt now to avoid missing significant retirement-induced seniority opportunity.