How Long to Pay Off a $3,000 Credit Card? (One Formula, Sheets or Excel)

$3,000 at 22% APR: about 15 years on a common minimum-payment rule, or 26 months at $150 a month. Build the calculator that gives you your own number, with one formula (NPER) that works in Google Sheets and Excel. Skip the build: Debt Payoff Planner (snowball + avalanche, up to 8 debts) — a paid template sold by the creator of this channel: https://payhip.com/b/1RC3Y?utm_source=yout... Chapters 0:00 The answer up front 0:37 Where the interest comes from 1:15 Build it: the NPER formula 2:17 What this pace costs 2:32 Avoid the #NUM! error 3:03 Compare payments 3:33 Pick a payoff date with PMT 3:59 What this doesn't capture 4:25 Recap Formulas from this video Months to pay off: =ROUNDUP(NPER(B2/12,-B3,B1),0) Total interest (approx.): =B3*NPER(B2/12,-B3,B1)-B1 With an error check: =IFERROR(ROUNDUP(NPER(B2/12,-B3,B1),0),"Payment too low") (same result as the IF version in the video) Payment to finish in 12 months: =PMT(B2/12,12,-B1) (B1 = balance, B2 = APR, B3 = monthly payment) Assumptions: Monthly interest = APR/12 (cards actually accrue daily, so real results differ slightly); no new charges; minimum-payment example uses 1% of balance + interest with a $25 floor. Sources Average APR on credit card accounts assessed interest, 22.36% (Aug 2026): Federal Reserve G.19 / FRED series TERMCBCCINTNS — https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TERMCBC... Minimum-payment rules (about 1% of the balance plus interest, or 2–4% of the balance, with a flat floor): Experian, Nov 2025 — https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experia... Educational content, not financial advice. Examples use made-up numbers; your card, loan and bank terms decide your real results. Narration: AI voice (Kokoro, open-source). Script, numbers and visuals are original; every figure was checked in a spreadsheet before publishing.