This should help you think before you swipe! If you’re paying the minimum balance on your credit card every month, try your best to come up with a way to throw a few extra bucks at it. Even if you have what you think is a very reasonable amount of debt—it’s hard to imagine that it could take decades to pay off, but it could!  For example:

If you have 10,000 in credit card debt on a card with 18% interest, it’ll take you almost 30 years to pay off! If the minimum payments are equal to interest plus 1% of the balance, it would take 342 months to pay off the debt by making minimum payments alone. That’s 28.5 years. During that time, you’d pay $14,423 in interest. That’s much more than the original balance on the card.