Agreed - any responsible person would have put pencil-to-paper, or found a calculator. Me, I use dinkytown.net for a bunch of different calculators.
====
let me burst the bubble here:
this is how all loans work.
mortgages are exactly the same. by the time you pay off a 30 year mortgage, you've generally paid 2-3 times the price of the home.
as rates go up and as time extends, this multiple rises. at 13.5% (a generous rate for unsecured debt from someone with middling credit), over 20 years you'll wind up paying about 3X your total borrowing.
3 minutes with one of 100 available online loan calculators would have made this plain, and itβs not like these terms or the basic function of interest over time were hidden concepts.
there is no trickery here, just math.
===

knowledge for college
funding for dummies: when you subsidize something, you get more of it