A Reddit user says Dave Ramsey‘s financial advice was “a huge shock to the system.” But it worked. In just 14 months, they paid off $422,000 in debt, including their entire mortgage.

In a recent post on r/DaveRamsey, a 45-year-old man shared that he and his 43-year-old wife found the personal finance expert’s method just a year ago. Before that, they were, as he put it, “normal.”

“We were ‘normal’ with two car payments, credit card debts, and a huge mortgage,” he wrote. After discovering Ramsey’s principles, the couple cut their spending drastically. They adopted the ‘rice and beans, beans and rice’ mentality Ramsey often preaches—focusing only on essentials and eliminating all luxuries. “No vacations, no extravagant purchases or eating out for about a year,” the poster said.

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According to the post, the couple paid off $35,000 in car loans, $5,000 in credit card debt, and $382,000 remaining on their mortgage. The original mortgage was $427,000, started in June 2021. They had paid off $45,000 before getting what they described as “gazelle intense.”

To accelerate the process, they liquidated investments. “Sold about $20k in stocks and $130k in crypto which helped quite a bit,” he said. They also sold a motorcycle and various household items for around $20,000 combined.

They didn’t stop there. They slashed their retirement contributions down to just the company match, cut all non-essentials, and funneled every bonus, tax refund and dollar of disposable income into debt repayment. Their combined take-home income was about $10,000 per month.

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Many congratulated them, but noted that this level of intensity doesn’t work for every household.

“We are fortunate to have a slightly bigger shovel,” OP replied, using a Ramsey-ism for higher income. “The biggest issue was to overcome the mental block and actually hit the sell button” on their investments.

While they didn’t follow the baby steps in perfect order—they skipped saving for their child’s college fund and focused on the mortgage—they said the economy and job market pushed them to prioritize becoming debt-free.

When asked how much they saved in interest by paying off the mortgage early, OP replied, “Looking at the amortization table, we saved about $134k in interest.”