In present-day forward time stepping ocean-climate models, capturing both the wind-driven and thermohaline components, a substantial amount of CPU time is needed in a so-called spin-up simulation to determine an equilibrium solution. In this paper, we present methodology based on Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov methods to reduce the computational time for such a spin-up problem. We apply the method to an idealized configuration of a state-of-the-art ocean model, the Modular Ocean Model version 4 (MOM4). It is shown that a typical speed-up of a factor 10-25 with respect to the original MOM4 code can be achieved and that this speed-up increases with increasing horizontal resolution.@en