Learn → Debt

How long will it take to pay off my debt?

Divide the balance by what you can pay each month for the floor, then expect interest to add twenty to fifty percent on top at credit-card rates — the smaller the payment, the bigger that penalty. A 3,000 balance at 150 a month takes about twenty-six months. At 250 a month, fourteen.

The rough version

Balance ÷ monthly payment = the number of months it would take with no interest. That is your floor, and it is always optimistic.

Interest adds to it, and how much depends on how fast you are paying. A 3,000 balance at 22%:

Monthly payment	No-interest floor	Actual	Total interest
100	30 months	44 months	1,395
150	20 months	26 months	771
200	15 months	18 months	541
250	12 months	14 months	420

Notice the penalty shrinking as the payment grows: 47% at 100 a month, 30% at 150, 20% at 200, 17% at 250. Slow repayment is punished twice — you are paying for longer, and paying more each month for the privilege.

Why the payment matters more than the rate

People negotiate rates and agonise over which card to clear first. Both matter less than the size of the payment.

Going from 100 to 200 a month on that balance takes 44 months to 18 and saves 854 in interest. Getting the rate from 22% down to 18% while still paying 100 saves considerably less.

Chase the rate if it is easy. Chase the payment first.

Doing it for your own debt

The clean way is a spreadsheet, one row per month:

Start with your balance.
Add one month’s interest: balance × (annual rate ÷ 12).
Subtract your payment.
Repeat until it reaches zero.

Twenty minutes of work, and it produces something more useful than a number — it produces a date. “Clear in April 2028” behaves differently in your head than “paying it off”. A date can be planned around, counted down, and survives a bad month. A vague intention does not.

If a spreadsheet is not your thing, any loan calculator does this. Just make sure it uses your actual rate rather than a default.

Two things that shorten it dramatically

Irregular money. A bonus, a tax refund, the sale of something unused. On that 3,000 balance at 150 a month, a single 500 payment takes 26 months down to about 22 and saves over 150 in interest. Lump sums are unusually powerful against debt because they cut the balance that all future interest is charged on.

Not letting the payment shrink. If your payment is a percentage of the balance, it falls as the balance falls, and the finish line retreats. Fix the amount. This is the whole reason minimum payments take decades — see what happens if you only pay the minimum.

If the date is years away

That is common, and it is not a reason to stop. Two things worth knowing:

The last months are much faster than the first. Early on, a large share of each payment is interest; later, almost all of it is principal. Progress accelerates, which is the opposite of how it feels at the start.

And the date moves whenever anything improves. A raise, a finished contract, a cancelled subscription — each one, redirected, pulls the date closer. Recalculate when something changes. Watching the date move is a better motivator than watching the balance, because the date moves faster.