Depending on your credit usage, you should be responsible with your credit card purchases and repay the money you borrow preferably in a timely manner. As with most things a repayment plan is required for controlling your finances while borrowing money. Our repayment calculator is a free online tool that enables you to create a repayment plan for your credit card or even other debts by simply filling out some values.

You borrow, you repay is the way most loans work, but the interest that’s charged to credit cards is compounded every day meaning you have to factor in more money to repay than you borrowed.

To work out you’re repayment plan you need to consider how much you can easily repay per week, this will enable you to focus on reducing your credit card debt and the amount of interest you will end up paying.

When using our credit card repayment calculator, fill out the amount borrowed and the interest being charged, this will calculate the terms of your transaction and the amount your specify for repayments will determine how long it will take you to fully repay.

Example

• $3000 Borrowed
• 19.99% Interest
• $300 monthly repayments

You’re repayment plan will look like this:

Credit Card Repayment Planning Calculator

In this scenario, you will on average pay $28.55 per month in interest, It will take you 12 months to fully repay, Total interest you will be charged is $342.58 making the total amount repayable $3342. Please not that this calculation does not include fees and charges plus there might be a slight variation in the interest calculations which will alter the outcome.

Try the credit card repayment calculator and start controlling your debt.

If you are concerned with the amount you have to repay, you could consider a balance transfer or lowering your interest rate to ease the repayments, you can test this out by altering the values in the calculator. See how much you could save with a better interest rate or initial period balance transfer.

Credit card debt in Australia has risen dramatically over the last 10 years; a lot of people have accumulated a credit card debt through lifestyle choices. If you are not careful about your spending habits you could find yourself in real financial trouble. If you can’t repay your credit card debt every month then you should get it as low as possible until you can. So if you use your credit card regularly then you should make regular repayments and stay on top of the money you owe.

Plan all credit card Expenses

Credit cards are a useful payment facility; you can organize payments of all sorts of things through a credit card like power bills, phone bills, groceries etc.. the list can go on. It is very convenient for people to setup their credit cards to handle bills; this also has the benefit of tracking bills through your credit card statements.

If you have a credit card setup this way or are planning to use credit cards for similar purposes, a simple budget and repayment plan should be used to manage your money and keep things from getting to difficult. So knowing what will be charged to your credit card is a must and will help you budget a repayment plan.

Know your weekly Spend?

With all these different bills coming out of your credit card, you need to know on average how much you are spending weekly. Because some bills are only monthly, bimonthly quarterly, half yearly or even yearly, you will need to add up there costs over a period of time (month) and divide that total over the number of weeks.

Example

Write out a chart of all the bills you are expecting to charge to your credit card, anything that goes on your credit card should be in this list.

List the name of the bill, the period it’s being charged in months and the amount charged.

You want to know what you will spend on each item over the month in the end. Interest charge on your credit card debt needs to be included, even the fees should be added to get better result.

Divide the amount by the month period of on every bill to get your average monthly spend.

To discover what the average weekly spend will be, you divide the average monthly spend by 4.

$388.33/ 4 weeks = $97.08 weekly spend.

This weekly spend is important to know especially if you already have a credit card debt. This is the amount you have to pay every week just to keep your credit card balance from growing any further.

Stay on top of your repayments

The best way to stay on top of your repayments is to make regular repayments. Now you know how much your credit card is being charged weekly on average, you can set aside part of your income to repay your credit card that amount. The effect of this is that you will not get a surprise when you receive your credit card statements and the balance will more or less be around the same level you started with, ready to begin a debt repayment plan.

Reduce your credit card debt

Get the interest rate monkey off your back. You know what to expect from your credit card on a weekly basis, if you keep up these weekly expenses you can now focus on the remaining debt. From your income, discover what you are able to use to repay the remaining credit card balance. This doesn’t have to be a large amount, but anything else you can put aside for your credit card will help reduce the debt balance. The more you repay on top of average weekly expenses the sooner you will be out of debt.

This budget plan is designed for people with a credit card debt already, yet is very simple and useful for new credit card consumers to use, I you plan your credit card repayments by your average weekly spend and get into a habit of making regular weekly repayments; your whole credit card experience will be a good one. Let debt levels build up before you take action is usually a recipe for disaster and a bad credit rating.

If you have anything to add or would like to point out other ways to budget a repayment plan, please leave a comment.

December credit card repayments increased on the back of the Australian governments first 10.4 billion stimulus package. The Reserve Bank of Australia has presented figures which showed a 22 percent increase in the amount of money spent on credit card repayments in the month.

The Australian Government first stimulus package was designed to strengthen the Australian economy by giving cash handouts to low and middle income earners in early December 2008. As suspected some people would use the cash to repay debts and a lot of Australians replayed their credit card debts with their handout.

“about a billion dollars has gone onto credit cards in the past month or two.”
(ABC, 2009, December credit card repayments at 3-year high)

Consumers have continued to make purchases with their credit cards during the Christmas period so the planned impact of the stimulus package has shown signs of its effectiveness in increasing retail trade figures in the December period when credit card spending rose by 20 %.

All this shows is that people are more aware of their credit cards debts and are trying to decrease there debts to reduce or even eliminate interest charges with the ultimate goal of saving money.

Consumers can save even more money on interest repayments if they reduce the interest rate of their credit cards. If you have a credit card with an interest rate above 15% you could save hundreds of dollars every year just by transferring your credit card balance to a low interest rate credit card.