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During the great depression, which is as close as we have come to a complete financial meltdown(that period also had great social upheaval-remember the Okies?) the banks continued to fail and great amounts of capital were lost. Farmers were a great proportion of the population back then and a large percentage of them that had crop loans lost their farms to those banks and their successors. (Mortgages were very uncommon, if you and your family didn't have cash, you simply didn't buy a house or farm, you rented forever. Easy mortgages were a result of the depression due to rewriting a lot of financial rules by the government.)
The farmers were forced off their lands by the banks, and as the banks failed completely, state governments took possession of the assets of the failed banks, sometimes large swaths of land were picked up by the states, sometimes in chunks of 8,000+ acres(now a lot of state forests or parks). Those farmers were dislocated, just like folks today losing their houses, and really had a tough road back. Going through foreclosure left a blot on their record just as surely as walking away from debt today will leave.
That being said, I think that a complete loss of all government structure(a doomsday such as what might follow a large nuclear exchange) is so unlikely as to be nothing to spend time planning for. No vacuum of power exists for long, chaos might be a localized thing, but the state would eventually return. I don't think anyone will walk away from their debts scotfree, the system of records on land transactions, land titles and debt is pretty well foolproof, and all that record is recorded in multiple places, so the history is always there. Heel n Toe had a very relevant comment, get out of debt now and the bank won't crush you at the worst possible moment(they are good at that).
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