Joe Mihalic wrote a fantastic post you have to read about the wisdom of paying your student loans off quickly. (And he knows a few things about how to pay off student loans.)
Here are a couple quick quotes from his post.
In this episode, I show that Max can save a substantial amount of money by paying down his student loans early to avoid interest expenses. His $26k loan will ultimately cost him $35.9k if he makes the standard $300 monthly payments over the 10-year term of the loan because the interest at 6.8% comes to $9.9k.
… I like to think of the loan amortization schedule as a sort of prison sentence. It explains exactly how much time Max is going to serve paying off the principal and interest components of his loan and how much extra he has to pay per month to get out of prison early for good behavior.
I love the comparison of your student loan repayment period to a prison sentence. It’s perfect. And the interesting thing is you get to decide if you are going to shorten your prison sentence. You get to decide how long you delay your freedom from student loans.
So no matter why you ended up in prison, the question you have to ask yourself is this: “How long am I going to stay in prison? How long am I going to keep these student loans in my life?”