Mighty Bargain Hunter

Good debt repayment calculator

December 4th, 2005 | by mbhunter |

If you have no more than three credit cards to pay off and you want to run some what-if’s, you can get an idea how long you will need to pay off your debts with this calculator at money.cnn.com. The calculator is on the left side near the bottom of the page. You can enter up to three cards, with your balances, rates, and minimum payments. Then you can choose a fixed amount to pay on all of your cards, or just the minimums, or see how much you will need to pay to be debt-free by a particular date.

For a freebie calculator it’s pretty good. The assumptions are reasonable, though you might be off a bit here and there because some credit card issuers will round your minimum payment to the next dollar, and they may have a minimum balance that they will allow you to carry that’s different from $20, which is what they assume. You trade some flexibility for some simplicity.

It’s a good tool to predict a ballpark date for the time you can bid your debt farewell!

Questions tagged credit-card at Cash Commons:

• Anybody have sucesss with 0% Balance Transfers on Credit Cards?
• When entering credit card information on a website, does the billing address have to be correct?
• Two of my credit cards got hit with fraudulent charges the same day. What gives?