When he’s 104: McCain looks to 2041… to pay off his credit-card debt

Mo’ money mo’ problems: Despite McCain’s allegiance to the credit card industry and his non-existent proposals to fix its widespread deceptive practices, it seems the multi-millionaire has run into some credit-card issues of his own. According to CreditCard.com’s Dan Ray, who pored through McCain’s 51 pages of financial disclosure forms, Sen. McCain is paying a whopping 25.99-percent interest rate on his personal Chase credit card. That’s at least ten percentage points above the average rate for 2007. In fact, it’s considered to be the default or penalty rate, meaning that McCain has been late on a payment or two and stuck with a ballooned fee.

McCain reported that he owes between $10,001 and $15,000 on his Chase card. His monthly minimum payment on a $10,001 debt would be $314.50. If he only made the minimum monthly payments, it would take him 406 months to pay off his debt. By then, he will have paid $21,670 in interest. It will also make him 104 years old and, well, like more than 50 percent of Americans suffering from compounding debt every month.

Of course, the mega-millionaire doesn’t have to worry about pesky little things like interest. That’s because as Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com notes, McCain has the bucks to pay off his entire balance in full every month. So even if he did have one late payment that caused the spike in rates and monthly payments, he would never see the affect of it because he and his wife Cindy pay their balance in full every month. According to the dislosure forms, they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the credit cards and then paying them off every month.

It’s a good thing for McCain: With some credit cards holding as much as a $250,000 balance, the interest on that could pay for an entire town to get out of the mortgage mess the credit industry helped create.