I usually pay fees, but chose the wrong time to save a little bit. I have a transaction (offering no fees) for ~$20 of BTC that is sitting "dead" for over 48 hours.
In the year 2014 ~ how many days can a BTC transaction go unconfirmed?
That depends on the wallet you used to send it. Did you use Bitcoin-Qt? MultiBit? Electrum? Armory? Blockchain.info?
In some cases it could remain unconfirmed until you remove the transaction from your wallet. In other cases the wallet will stop broadcasting the transaction after a few days.