Debt Consolidation Calculator

This calculator runs two very different projections side by side: what you're already paying (Current Total Cost) against what a single consolidation loan would cost (Consolidation Total Cost), then reports the difference. Both sides are now true declining-balance amortizations — the current-debt side simulates your payment month by month, recomputing interest on the actual remaining balance each time (mirroring credit-card-payoff.ts), rather than charging interest on the original Total Debt Amount for every month of the payoff the way an earlier version of this calculator did. If Current Monthly Payment can't cover even the first month's interest, the debt would never actually get paid off at that payment — the simulation stops immediately, Current Months to Payoff reports the sentinel value -1, and Current Total Cost reports just Total Debt Amount with zero interest counted, rather than pretending the debt was retired instantly for free. At this calculator's own defaults, that break-even sits at exactly $375 per month.

Total Debt Amount dominates Current Total Cost: its ±10% span is roughly 34% of Current Total Cost, versus Current Monthly Payment's roughly 15% and Current Average Interest Rate's roughly 14% — all three feed the current-debt payoff simulation, but the balance carries the most weight because it's both the amount owed and the base the first month's interest is computed from. Total Savings and Interest Savings are built from two different-looking subtractions, but they're mathematically identical: Total Debt Amount is added into Current Total Cost but subtracted back out to get Consolidation Total Interest (consolidationTotalInterest = consolidationTotalCost - totalDebt), so it cancels out algebraically across the two savings formulas, not because it's added identically on both sides — and the two figures always agree to the penny, not just at this particular set of inputs. Consolidation Loan Rate and Consolidation Loan Term never move Current Total Cost — they only feed the consolidation side of the comparison. This calculator does not account for loan origination fees, prepayment penalties on your existing debts, or the risk of running up new balances on cards you've just paid off.