Time and interest to clear the card.
Time to clear
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Total interest paid
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If you paid only 2.5% minimum
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Worked example
Take an $8,000 balance on a card charging 19.99 percent per year. If you pay a fixed $400 a month, the calculator clears it in about 25 months, roughly 2 years and 1 month, for about $1,812 of interest. Now compare that with paying only the 2.5 percent minimum. The minimum starts near $200 and shrinks as the balance falls, so it barely outruns the interest. On that path the debt drags on for about 315 months, more than 26 years, and racks up around $14,640 in interest, almost twice the original balance. The lesson is stark: a fixed payment well above the minimum is what actually clears a card, while the minimum is designed to keep you in debt.
| Approach | Time to clear | Total interest |
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How it is calculated
The calculator runs a month-by-month simulation of the card balance. Each month it charges interest at the annual rate divided by 12, adds it to the balance, then subtracts your payment, repeating until the balance hits zero. For the fixed scenario it uses the amount you enter every month. For the minimum scenario it recalculates the payment each month as 2.5 percent of the current balance, with a small floor, which is why that payment keeps shrinking and the payoff stretches out for decades. If a payment is too small to cover the interest charged, the balance never falls and the tool reports that the payment will never clear the debt. Total interest is the sum of every monthly interest charge across the life of the balance.