Credit card debt compounds DAILY to maximize income from banks at the expense of people who see few options and/or don’t really understand or are avoiding thinking about how evil that is. That means that both your debt and the rate you pay increase every day, so if you’re owing $1000 in interest one month, and you pay the minimum required payment, you’ll be owing even more than $1000 more the next month. If your debt on a 20% APR credit card were about $60,000, interest would be increasing it at about $33 per day, so you’d be gaining about $1000 debt per month from interest.