My debt nightmare… and how I started again from scratch: ANDREA McLEAN was a Loose Women star on six figures before she lost everything. This is how she got back on her feet – and her advice to anyone going through financial hell

Two years ago, Andrea McLean found one of her old wallets. It had £60 inside and the then 54-year-old was delighted. She wondered what she would spend the money on – maybe rent, or a heating bill. Eventually, she and her husband, Nick Feeney, decided they would get a Chinese takeaway. 

The couple – who have been married for eight years and have two children each from previous partners – used to have a weekly takeaway. ‘But we hadn’t done that for a good two years,’ says McLean today. ‘And gosh, to tell the kids “We’re getting a Chinese”. It felt like the most amazing thing.’

To explain: in 2023, McLean, who served for 13 years as an anchor on the ITV daytime show Loose Women, ran out of money. At the peak of her TV career in 2012 she was on a six-figure salary, but after she quit Loose Women in 2020 to start a business with Feeney, she put all her savings into the company. It folded, then she couldn’t find a new job, and she and Feeney got into huge amounts of debt.

‘I didn’t actually add [the debt] up in total,’ she says. ‘But it was a lot. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.’ When I ask if there was ever a moment where she looked at her bank account and saw it only had, for example, £2.60, McLean says no. ‘Because it was less than £2.60. It was minus. And I can’t remember an exact moment, because it just went on and on and on.’

By 2025, McLean had settled those debts. But, as we will see, she had also: sold her house, cashed out her entire pension early, got rid of all her clothes and furniture, and sold the two old engagement rings she had planned on leaving to her children in her will.

Today, she lives in a rented apartment in southern Spain with Feeney. This month she is publishing Shameless – a book that details, for the first time, what happened to her financially. ‘I was sick of sitting in the dark, hoping one day it would get better and that no one would find out. I just thought, “The only way I can get out of that is to shine a massive light on it”.’

This Girl Is On Fire, McLean and Feeney’s company, began as a life-advice blog (McLean wrote posts aimed at women) and shopping website (they sold ‘female-focused’ products, from other female-owned businesses). When the latter aspect shuttered overnight during Covid, the couple decided to turn the product into an app. Users could pay a subscription fee (£19.99 a month) to access masterclasses on various subjects: how to build confidence, how to get a good night’s sleep, how to be a calm parent. The lectures would be given by experts including McLean herself.

The original blog had hundreds of thousands of dedicated readers and, as a result, she and Feeney really thought the product would work. So much so, they refused investment – ‘I thought “No one is going to believe in this as passionately as we do”‘ – and instead took out loans and remortgaged their house.

McLean imagined she’d pay everything back once the business was a success. But by 2021 there were still stacks of unpaid bills – and she was so busy with the app that she ignored the letters asking her to pay them. ‘Then, obviously, a bailiff came knocking.’ An hour later, her and Feeney’s Surrey house was on the market. It sold for £1 million. They started renting nearby and paid off their debts. ‘It didn’t feel like the end of the world. It was more like, “S**t, we took our eye off the ball”.’

They continued paying PRs, tech people and designers to make their app. At one point the pair were putting £20,000 of their own money into the business each month. (Feeney, an entrepreneur who had a property portfolio, sold all of his homes for extra funds.) By August 2022, the supposed launch date, ‘the app just didn’t work’. Apple changed its privacy labels requirements, McLean’s tech gurus hadn’t realised and the product was rejected by the App Store. ‘That was horrific.’

Then McLean got long Covid. ‘And it became apparent that everything had bottlenecked with me; if I couldn’t work, we couldn’t keep going,’ she says.

In March 2023, they paid their freelancers and folded the business. ‘So things were tied up neatly in terms of those individuals’ – just not in terms of McLean and Feeney themselves. The couple ‘took a deep look at [their] finances’, calculating how long they had to pay rent and bills (with the money in their accounts) until they found other jobs. They estimated three months.

McLean wasn’t sure how she would work with her long Covid, but she searched for jobs nonetheless. Only, at 53, people weren’t interested in hiring her. The brands she worked with during Loose Women had dropped her once she left the show; an industry friend she’d known for decades promised her work and then pulled out ‘at the 11th hour’. (Apparently, the friend said, McLean’s ‘star had faded’.)

‘I thought, “How could I ever stop working? I’ve worked since I was 15 years old! I will always find a job”.’ Feeney found himself similarly stuck. Meanwhile, the three-month window they had before they ran out of money got ‘smaller and smaller and smaller, and then it was…’ – she makes a small ‘poof’ sound. ‘It’s a feeling of disbelief. You actually can’t believe you’ve fallen over the cliff.’

By September, McLean still hadn’t found work and applied for a barista job at Starbucks. She told her agent – who had stuck by her – and they said she couldn’t do it: someone would spot her, take a picture and it would end up in the papers. She didn’t care. ‘I was prepared to go through the whole, “Are you that lady from the telly? Oh how the mighty have fallen!” thing.’ But, says McLean, ‘the shocking bit was that I couldn’t even get it [the Starbucks job]’. The coffee company never even replied to her application. (Eventually, McLean did find work – presenting jobs here, brand jobs there – which was helpful, but they were not regular enough.)

The couple ‘adjusted surprisingly fast’ to having no money. ‘I’m really lucky that I’m not a “things and stuff” person,’ says McLean. She sold her clothes on Vinted and their furniture on Facebook Marketplace.

Some things, however, were hard to lose. ‘I’ve been married twice previously and had engagement and wedding rings from my previous husbands,’ says McLean. She planned on giving that jewellery to her children when she died. ‘And I thought, “This is horrible, but I’d rather [those rings] went first instead of the one I’m wearing on my hand. It wasn’t very nice, but there wasn’t the same emotional attachment to them. It was more: “Oh, I wanted to pass these on to my kids, but we need this [money] now”.’ The rings went to a jeweller, but people realise that if you’re selling an engagement ring for cash you’re probably in financial trouble and in no position to negotiate. ‘So we got peanuts for them’ – £350 for both sets of rings.

Months later, McLean still needed money. So, ‘quietly, I took my own wedding ring and engagement ring off, buffed them up and put them in the box they’d come in’. Her husband took them to a jeweller who offered £1,000 for the pair – a lot less than they were worth – and Feeney had to say no. ‘He just couldn’t do it.’

The couple curbed their lifestyle. They moved into a smaller rental flat; they never went out for meals; they brought their own coffee in flasks to drink in between prospective work meetings. Bar McLean’s daughter Amy, their children had left home. But they knew what was happening and adapted to these newer, tighter lives. ‘Weirdly, I think it was the making of them.’

‘The absolute worst thing,’ says McLean, was asking her dad – a retired factory engineer from Glasgow – to lend her money. ‘Because I’m proud, self-sufficient, successful.’ Jack McLean was ‘shocked’ and ‘upset’ and gave her what she needed. He also said he wished she’d told him sooner, so he could have helped her earlier.

Besides her family, McLean didn’t tell anyone what she was experiencing. She recently sent an early copy of her book to her old Loose Women colleague Denise Welch. ‘I felt quite bad, actually, because I suppose I should have warned her [what was in the book]. She was devastated [for me] and she was devastated as a friend that I hadn’t reached out to her,’ she says. ‘But I was just trying to fix a problem.’

When McLean turned 55, she cashed out her entire pension. ‘I’d rather not say how much was in there, but it was good,’ she says. It was a life’s work, and she lost 40 per cent of it to tax. ‘But I needed it.’

That, the selling of all their things, and the scaling back of their spending, meant that, finally, her and Feeney’s debts were settled. ‘It wasn’t like we now were rolling in money, but at least from then on everything we earned was going in the right direction.’

McLean is admirably positive; she likes to reframe her setbacks into something sunny. Paying 40 per cent tax on her pension? ‘I’m just so grateful I had it.’

Selling her family home? ‘I thought, “Right, this is just another stage…” and then I left the family who were moving in a card and a bottle of wine.’

The thing she cannot soften is that, just before Christmas 2024, she got pneumonia, which turned into sepsis and kidney failure, and she was hospitalised for weeks. 

Her sickness ‘was the catalyst’ for her and Feeney to end their rental lease in London and move to Spain. McLean thought warm weather might help her recovery, plus Amy was starting at a Spanish university and living there was cheaper than in Britain. They rented a two-bed home (so there was a spare room for any visiting children), got three-year-long ‘digital nomad’ visas, and moved last July. ‘If all goes well, I hope we stay here for ever,’ she says.

McLean ‘treated [recovery] like a job’ for months and, now she’s better, she is working quite steadily. There is this book, various speaking jobs, and she’s currently writing her first novel. Feeney, meanwhile, works as a coach with private clients and for the charity Children With Cancer UK. 

Financially, ‘it’s very thin layer upon very thin layer. Don’t get me wrong, we could do with winning the lottery! But a buffer is slowly but surely [building].’

Now, she and Feeney allow themselves the occasional celebration. ‘We are still a way off booking a holiday, but we squirrel money away for nice meals. And we really enjoy them,’ she says. ‘We’ll have a bottle of wine – not just a glass – and we toast each other, because we’re still at it. We’re not quite at the coalface but we still love each other, we still like each other. There aren’t that many couples who could have done this.’

For a long time, all McLean thought about was money. ‘I had that sort of overwhelming, jaw-clenching worry.’ (Literally: ‘I bit through a retainer [in my sleep] and cracked my tooth.’) A few weeks ago, she noticed it had gone. ‘The sun had started to come out, and I don’t know if it was the freedom of the book coming out, but I thought: “It’s done, I’ve literally set this free”. And I feel really hopeful.’

She continues: ‘For a while, I was almost too scared to hope [things would get better]. Because it’s the hope that kills you. That was a hard flip-flop for my brain to make, to try to steer it back to being hopeful. But, yeah. I’m there now.’

Shameless: Finding Freedom And Resilience Through Failure by Andrea McLean will be published on Thursday by DK Red, £16.99. To order a copy for £15.29 until May 31, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.