Recent research has been carried out showing that some credit card holders could face making repayments on a relatively low credit card balance for three decades. Officials from uswitch.com, who conducted the research, said that some people could be facing thirty years of repayments even on a debt of just £1400. The research showed that consumers that are paying just a minimum 2% repayment on this balance each month would take around thirty one years to repay the debt.

In addition to this not only will cardholders that make just the minimum repayment be paying off their debt for decades to come, but many will also pay huge sums of interest over this period, making their borrowing far more expensive. In fact, cardholder with this type of balance could end up paying close to £3000 in interest over that period of time.

One official from uswitch.com stated: : ‘Over the past year we have seen an increase in credit card spending, making minimum repayment levels more of a problem now than ever before. With the cost of living on the up and people being forced to tighten their purse strings, consumers will be more tempted to just make the minimum repayment on their credit cards and spend the cash on more pressing bills.’

It is thought that around 11%, which more than one in ten, cardholders make only the minimum repayment, particularly in the current difficult financial climate. However, officials have said that even by increasing your monthly repayment by just a small amount you could find that the time over which you have to pay is cut dramatically, and the amount of interest that you end up paying is vastly reduced.