Shannon McLay, CEO of The Financial Gym, joins TheStreet to explain her business model and how it can help with finances.
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00:00So the financial gym is taking a gym model and bringing it over to the world of personal finance.
00:07So how does that work and what are the benefits?
00:10Yes, so years ago when I was working as a Merrill Lynch financial advisor,
00:14I saw so many people who didn't have $250,000 of investable assets,
00:20which is what you needed to work with me at Merrill Lynch.
00:23I saw so many people who didn't have that but wanted financial guidance
00:26and wanted to get it from a human being.
00:29And even to this day, it's been 11 years now, but even now it's like most companies will say
00:34use an app or use a bot or AI, some AI financial planner.
00:40But money is very personal and I think most people don't understand money and personal finance.
00:47And I wanted to figure out a way to deliver it to the masses.
00:50And I thought there's so many places we could go to get physically healthy if we wanted to,
00:54but if we wanted to get financially healthy, where would we go?
00:57And I thought we would go to a financial gym.
00:58And similar to a regular gym, people could pay a monthly fee and get the workout they needed.
01:04So somebody might be working on their debt, somebody might be working on budgeting,
01:08somebody might be working on investing and leveling up their game,
01:12but there's a workout for everybody.
01:13But how does the financial gym help a person deal, cope with financial shame?
01:21Yes, that's actually the first step that we take with working with clients.
01:26We call the first session you have with us, with your trainer,
01:28we call it the financially naked session and it's tongue in cheek and what we say,
01:33but what we're doing is we're acknowledging the shame right away.
01:36We realize if you're going to tell us how much credit card debt you have,
01:39what your income is, how much is in your bank account,
01:42we realize those are all highly charged,
01:45how people feel like highly charged emotional subject areas.
01:48And so we realize that they feel like they're stripping naked in front of us.
01:52They're stripping financially naked and they feel embarrassed.
01:56And our first day, our first session is to understand and tell them that we understand that.
02:01We don't care what you look like financially.
02:03We don't care what your balance sheet looks like.
02:05We don't care.
02:06We just care about where you want to go.
02:08And we can't take back how you got here, but we can change where you go from there.
02:12And a lot of that initial work is accepting,
02:16giving people grace on the financial decisions they've made and realizing that
02:20the big thing we say at the gym all the time is anything you do financially is fixable.
02:26Anything, whether it's bankruptcy, too much credit card debt,
02:29not enough saved, not prepared for retirement.
02:32Everything you do financially is fixable.
02:34So understand that no matter what you did to get here, no big deal.
02:38It's just how much fixing do we have to do to get you where you want to go?