Free credit card payment calculators

Hello-

Do you know how much your debt is costing you?  Have you seen the numbers of how long it will take you to pay off your debts if you just pay the minimum?

There are several credit card payment calculators available to give you the sobering news about your credit card debt.

Here are a couple free calculators from Bankrate that give you the details of how long you will be in debt if you just pay the minimum:

The true cost of paying the minimum:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calc/MinPayment.asp

This shows you how much money you are throwing away when you do not pay off the balance each month.

Here’s another one from Bankrate that helps you calculate what it will take to pay off your credit cards in a specified period of time.  Say you want to be out of debt in 3 years, it will figure out how much your payments need to be each month.

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calc/creditcardpay.asp

So for example, if you have about $56,000 worth of credit card debt and your interest rate is about 12%, you will need to make payments of $1860.00 every month to pay off your credit cards in 36 months.

For people with that same amount of debt but with a much higher interest rate, say 18%, it would require $2024.53 every month to get out of debt.

And let’s say you have an even higher interest rate, which I know many people do, like 29% APR, $2346.72 every month is what you would need to pay.

Here’s another free calculator from CNNMoney and it gives you a graphical representation of the same information for those of you who like pictures and graphs.

http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/debtplanner/debtplanner.jsp

And here’s my graph for just paying the minimum each month:

According to this chart, I’ll be debt free in just 34 years and 4 months and will have paid over $46K in interest charges.  Ouch.

So do yourself a favor and run your numbers real quick and see if that motivates you a little bit more to get out of debt.

-Adam