A credit card balance has two clocks: the one on your statement, and the real one — how many months of payments until zero. This calculator runs the real one, and shows the total interest your APR extracts along the way.
How card interest compounds against you
Each month your balance is charged APR ÷ 12. On $5,000 at 22%, that's about $92 — meaning the first $92 of any payment vanishes into interest before touching the debt. Pay $200 and only $108 hits the principal; the payoff takes about 33 months and $1,500 of interest. Pay $100 and you're trapped near the interest line for years.
The minimum payment trap
Issuers set minimums around 1–3% of the balance — deliberately close to the interest charge. Minimums on a $5,000 balance can stretch payoff beyond 15 years and roughly double the repayment. The calculator's warning state shows the exact threshold: any payment at or below balance × APR ÷ 12 never finishes, mathematically.
What actually speeds things up
The insight line shows the 1.5× experiment live: raising a $200 payment to $300 on that $5,000 balance cuts about 13 months and hundreds in interest. Windfalls work the same way — every extra dollar goes 100% to principal. Juggling several cards? The debt payoff calculator compares avalanche vs snowball ordering across all of them, and the loan calculator handles fixed-term loans.
The formula, honestly
Payoff time isn't linear: n = −log(1 − B·r/P) ÷ log(1+r). As P approaches the monthly interest B·r, the logarithm's argument approaches zero and months shoot toward infinity — the mathematical face of the minimum-payment trap.
For information only; not financial advice.