This doesn't cancel the concerns, though.

You can have bankruptcy and have little to no debt for years. A foreclosure, repo, or eviction can happen for various reasons. Maybe you simply got sick and were missing work. You can owe money on your house - a reasonable amount - and be stuck because you can't sell your house nor afford to both pay the current house mortgage and live somewhere else.

Some of the "debt" things are special to being poor. Lose your job and can't pay the final cable bill? Collections. Can't pay the $600 hospital bill? Collections and eventual judgement. It doesn't take a large amount of debt to have it affect your life negatively when a flat tire puts your electricity at risk of being turned off.

I wonder if there's a correlation between American debt decreasing due to poor support for retired workers. Americans are wising up to the fact they need to save for their retirement since pensions are rare nowadays.

I'm not familiar with the work structure in those other countries, but guessing there's a far better support structure for retirees compared to the US.

I wouldn't have thought that but we're talking about smaller, "dying" towns here. Their financial/economic circumstances are going to be much different.

Unfortunately in 2017 ~40% of US families would have trouble coming up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-repor... (see Dealing with Unexpected Expenses pg. 21)