This is part of our series on strategies you can adopt to free yourself from burdensome debt.

You're very wise to want to enter retirement debt free. Once you reach the point where you must learn to live on a fixed retirement income, you'll quickly know how brilliant you were to get your loans paid off first.

The basics of debt payoff are the same for near-retirees as they are for anyone. I recommend you use the snowball effect to get your debt paid down as quickly as possible.

You may want to reduce the amount you are saving monthly in your retirement accounts, such as your 401(k), and instead use that extra cash to pay down your debt more quickly. Now that you are near retirement there isn't much time for that money to grow anyway. But, if you do decide to take this step be sure to at least put enough into your employer retirement savings plan to get your full employer match. You don't want to give up the extra money your employer deposits into your retirement savings. Definitely check with your financial advisor before taking this step.

This is part of our series on strategies you can adopt to free yourself from burdensome debt.

There is no doubt that the hardest part about getting out of debt is finding the extra cash to do it with. Most of our posts here on WalletPop deal with different shades of that perplexing question -- how to generate extra income, spend less money, find the cheapest credit cards -- all towards the goal of reducing your punishing levels of debt.

But there is another, not quite so hard question about getting out of debt that we've only scratched the surface of so far on WalletPop. That is, once you've unlocked that extra cash and are in a position to start actually getting out of debt, what is the best way to pay it off?

Simple answer: That depends on your goals. In this series we list common reasons people want to reduce their debt load and the best strategy for that goal.

The two main techniques for spending down debt, our blogger Lita Epstein has come up with are the 'Snowball Effect' and the 'Round Robin.' The snowball effect is best for people who are getting eaten alive by high interest charges on their credit card balances. The plan there is to simply pay off your high interest credit cards first.