Hello, I don't know if this is a correct place to post this kind of questions, but I am posting it anyways. I am writing a small utility that would give a payment plan to payoff Credit Cards. I take a collection of Creidt Cards and on each iteration I calculate the amount to be paid for that card for that iteration using the formula amountforcard = amount * (_balance*_apr/SUM(_balance*_apr)) I think this one works fairly well to give a good estimate of the payment to be made to the cards. I was wondering if I can use any numerical methods so that the interest will be minimum. This might be very trivial application, but I was wondering if there are any?Thankschinnu

even Excel can do the trick. Try implementing it in the spread sheet and use the solvergood luck

Yeah. Thats true. But this is a webfront end. May be I will use google spreadsheets. my question was more on getting the formula to minimize the interest. Thanks anyways. ThanksDilip

Wouldn't the correct answer be to pay down the highest interest rate card first, subject to the minimum payments on the others? That is, I assume you have a fixed amount you plan to pay each month. Pay off the minimum on all the cards except the highest one, which gets the rest of the amount.I have not verified this, but it seems to be the right way to go about it, no matter what the balance is on each card. If I have a balance of 5000 on one @ 5% and a balance of 1000 @ 20%, I am really comparing the following situation:Card 14000 @ 5% + 1000 @ 5% vs.Card 2 1000 @ 20%The comparison of the 1000 amounts is key.

QuoteOriginally posted by: MMPWouldn't the correct answer be to pay down the highest interest rate card first, subject to the minimum payments on the others?Yes, this is clearly the best strategy. It might be a little bit different if you took into account break points (such as interest rate surcharges when you go over certain balances in some cards) but in most reasonable cases it wouldn't make enough difference to be worth collecting all the extra data.I think a more useful calculator would tell you how quickly you can pay everything off using different amounts of money.