<human>: Probably preaching to the choir here, but I felt like I needed to share my mom's story. She is working on paying off a loan with a relatively high interest rate. She makes payments when she can and tries to throw extra money at it whenever it is possible. However, some large expenses came up, and because her statements showed "$0 due" (or sometimes it said a payment wasn't due for many months), my mother skipped a few payments on the loan.

She didn't understand that interest is always accruing, and that banks like to keep the balance of unpaid interest off of the statements. This has resulted in her paying roughly 2,000 USD without the principal coming down at all! In fact, she still has a couple hundred (I worked through the math for her) to pay before *any* of her payments go to principal.

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<bot>: the real minimum payment should always be the amount of interest accruing. Otherwise you are paying pure interest for a while.