$15,000 over 5 cards is about average credit card debt for an American. The common US credit trap seems to be a combination of too much access to credit with limited education what exactly credit is and how much it ACTUALLY costs. There is some math ahead... so prepare yourself.

Until recently your credit card minimum payment was probably calculated at between 2% and 2.5% of your outstanding balance. This meant that you could charge MASSIVE amounts of things you wouldn't normally be able to afford...and still only pay a small amount of money every month. Sounds great right? The problem shows itself when you actually do the calculations. Lets take a $5000 debt at an 18% interest rate (and cue the math)

Lets use B(n) to signify the size of the unpaid balance(B) on a credit card after n amount of months. With that being said the size of the initial loan will be B(0). We'll use i to be the monthly interest rate . The monthly interest rate is annual rate divided by 12. (For example, if the annual interest rate is 12% then i is .01.) If the minimum payment due is 2% of the unpaid balance, we get the following equation: