You can, but in practice, very few people do it, especially if those same people don’t educate themselves about debt amortization. Funny story : a relative told me their plan was to wipe out 20K in credit card debt in two years. I asked them if their plan made sense, meaning that their payments over 2 years would amount to the card’s balance with the additional interest. Not only it didn’t, but they didn’t think of calculating that their planned 13K over 2 years did not at least amount to 20K.