We were intrigued by a recent post from Wallet Pop reporting that the 12 Days of Christmas would cost you a total of $23,439. Since most people would probably use a credit card to make those purchases, and wouldn’t pay it off right away…we started thinking… What if you did put it on plastic, and took three years to pay off the balance? How much would this year’s 12 Days of Christmas cost then?

We decided to find out. We took the information in the Wallet Pop article (we’re keeping the U.S. dollar figures — the exchange rate is close enough for our purposes), added 13% for HST (reflecting Ontario’s rate). We assumed a 19% interest rate on the credit card and a 36 month payoff.

If you bought everything all at once, and it cost $23,439, once you add the HST you end up with a total cost of $26,486.07. Then if you took three years to pay it off, it would cost you a total of $34,951.46. If you only paid the minimum on your credit card, it would cost even more!

With a 19% card, and minimum payment that amounts to interest plus 3% of your balance, it would take you a little more than 27 years, and you would have a total payoff of $55,745.85.

Here’s the breakdown of each item, if you paid only the minimum:

You can learn a valuable lesson from this list — and not just that it pays way more to be a lord-a-leaping than it does to be a lady dancing. As you can see, putting anything on a credit card and then only paying the minimum starts to add up. In some cases, you even get to the point where, by the time you pay off your credit card, you will have paid more in interest than the original cost of the item.

So, consider giving less expensive — yet still thoughtful — gifts this holiday season. Only put on your credit card what you can afford to pay off.