(ABC NEWS) – Americans owe a staggering $1.48 trillion in student loan debt, according to a recent survey for NerdWallet.

Like many Americans with college debt? Quenton and Marchelle Ross couldn’t wait to pay it off.

“It was a huge burden,” Marchell said. “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t attached to our lives forever.”

So they did something most people only dream of? They managed to pay off their combined debt of $120,000 in just two and a half years?

But how?

“The two biggest things that we did was to cut back the wasteful spending so the going out to eat, the buying unnecessary groceries, the buying the hypothetical outfits, the shoes that I may wear one day and we were intentional about having to for the short term sacrifice time,” Quenton said.

The couple pulls in about $150,000 from their jobs to tackle the debt, they adopted what’s called the snowball method where they paid off the smallest debt first.

They were careful with their finances? The first check of the month would go toward necessities like mortgage, food and utilities.

The second check that came in would go toward the student loan debt

They reworked their budget right down to every cent spent on groceries.

“Marchelle, she started only buying maybe two to four days out as opposed to buying, two weeks worth of groceries.”

To help them along, Quenton put in extra time at work, sometimes up to 75 hours per week.

“When we made the last payment – it’s a feeling you can’t describe // so when we got that last knockout punch it was it was just like the ali moment where you really feel like you were the champion over that situation.”

There are a number of apps to help with this, including the Debt Payoff Planner and Debt Tracker.

With Debt Payoff Planner, you can create step-by-step plan for paying off your debt. The plan includes the exact amount you should pay on each debt each month to help you stay on schedule. Plus, it’ll show you when you’ll be completely debt free, what you owe, how much interest you’ll pay and over how many payments.

It lets you choose three different payoff strategies so you can decide which works best for you.