The longer you stretch that debt out, the more of your money goes to interest and not towards actually paying off debt.

And also–please, please don’t make just minimum payments.

It’s tempting to send out $20/month to get the credit card company off your back.

But that’s what they want you to do.  They want you to keep paying the minimum payment so they can earn a steady income from you over time.

What they don’t want you to do is to pay off your debt in larger amounts.

For example, take someone who has two credit cards with balances. One has a $3,000 balance at 15 percent, and the other is a $2,500 balance at 17.9 percent.

At a minimum monthly payment of $131 it will take just over five years to be debt-free and cost a little over $8,000 (with 33 percent of that being interest). But pay less than $100 more a month — $222 a month total — and you can be debt-free in two years and seven months, and the total cost will be $6,753 with only 19 percent of that interest.

You save nearly two and a half years and $1300 in this scenario simply by paying a little extra, sooner.