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Financial Gym is disrupting the industry by taking advantage of the world of fitness. Instead of complicated spreadsheets, the company offers personalized financial coaching, helping you get to the best financial position possible. Shannon McLay, CEO of Financial Gym, joined TheStreet to discuss this unique approach.
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Full text of the video below:
Conway Gittins: So the Financial Gym takes the gym model and brings it into the world of personal finance. How does it work and what are the benefits?
Shannon McLay: Yeah, years ago when I was a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, I saw a lot of people who didn’t have $250,000 in investable assets, which is what I needed to work with me at Merrill Lynch. I saw a lot of people who didn’t have that but wanted financial guidance and wanted to get it from a human. And to this day, it’s been 11 years now, but so far, most of the companies say, use an app or, you know, use a robot or an AI, or an AI-based financial planner.
But money is a very personal thing. I think most people don’t understand money and personal finance. And I wanted to find a way to bring it to the masses. And I thought there are a lot of places we can go to get healthy physically if we want to get healthy financially, but if we want to get healthy financially, where do we go? And I thought we would go to a financial gym, and just like a regular gym, people can pay a monthly fee and get the workout they need. So, you know, someone might be working on paying off their debt, someone might be working on a budget, someone might be working on investing and getting better. But there’s a workout for everyone.
Gittens: How does a financial gym help someone deal with financial shame?
Maclay: Yes, that’s the first step we take in working with clients. We call the first session a financial naked session. It’s a session that you have with us and the coach. We call it a financial naked session. It’s a sarcastic session. But what we do is we acknowledge the shame right away. We realize that if you tell us how much credit card debt you have, or what your income is, or how much money is in your bank account, we realize that those are all very charged things, and how people feel very charged and emotionally charged areas. So we realize that they feel like they’re stripping down in front of us. They’re stripping down financially. And they feel embarrassed.
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Maclay: On our first day, our first session, we understand and tell them that we understand them, and we don’t care about what your financials look like. We don’t care about what your balance sheet looks like, we don’t care. We just care about where you want to go. And we can’t undo how you got here, but we can change where you go from there. And a lot of that initial work is accepting people and giving them a chance in terms of the financial decisions that they’ve made and realizing that the big thing we say in the gym all the time is that anything you do financially can be fixed. Anything, whether it’s going bankrupt, having too much credit card debt, not saving enough, not being prepared for retirement. Everything you do financially can be fixed. So understand that whatever you did to get here, it’s no big deal. It’s just how much we need to fix to get you to where you want to go.
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