About 5 years. We paid roughly 20k a year on loans to get 105k down to about 10k (interest added another 5k onto principle).
Couple of things about tax treatment here--- you can deduct up to $2500 a year in paid student loan interest (just like a mortgage) if your married filing jointly income does not exceed 120k, at which point is phases out till entirely phased out at 150k.
Your unsubsidized student loans have their interest recapitalized as principle during school. What that means is that the last few thousand of any payments you make on a given loan are likely to be interest only. So if you are sitting there with an unsubsidized loan with a remaining balance of 2 or 3k that had an original balance of 10k or more and your married filing jointly income is below 120k, you might consider paying that loan off at the end of the year to get the most tax deduction.
Also, at least for me, I could pick and chose which loans I paid extra on, so I paid all of my high interest rate loans off. For those of you that consolidated, well you fucked up there. I dumped all my 6.8 and 8.4 rate loans early on and then had just the 2% stuff left thereafter.
