Andrea McLean says she lost all her brand deals when she left Loose Women

Andrea McLean has opened up about the unexpected financial hit that all her brand endorsements made deals with her overnight when she left Loose Women

Video is loading

Video not available

The video will start playing automatically soon8thCancel

Play Now

Loose Women: Andrea McLean returns as a guest on the show

Andrea McLean has told how she suffered a “punch in the stomach” when a number of brands cut ties with her on the same day she quit her high-paying ITV job as presenter of Loose Women.

The 52-year-old presenter took the bold step of leaving the daytime chat show she worked on for 13 years after a nervous breakdown and global pandemic caused her to re-evaluate her life.

But despite factoring in the loss of her salary as a “breadwinner,” she suffered an unexpected financial setback when money she’d earned from brand endorsement deals was withdrawn.

She confessed, “When I made the announcement that I was leaving television to follow my heart and my dreams, I went all out on ‘This Girl is On Fire.’

“I was the breadwinner and that was the job that paid the bills, but everyone on TV does jobs too.”

The presenter revealed that she and husband Nick Feeney discussed at length the logistics of their big career transition as she pursued her own path and wrote a motivational book about her experience.

She said: “I had enough corporate work in line to get the funding before I wrote This Girl’s On Fire and got going, so it was a calculated decision.

“The day I announced I was leaving, all the brands dropped me … so I said, ‘Okay, I knew I was getting this kind of money coming in and this amount of work that would take me through the next six will bring eight months”, it disappeared overnight.

“That’s how big the move away from television is. It was like a punch in the gut financially, my safety net was gone. I said, ‘Oh my god, I only have my life savings. I can’t turn back and change my mind. I have no agreement.”

But instead of bothering with the brands that knocked her out of the way the minute she stepped off the TV, she’s decided to take a glass-half-full approach to earning her lucrative extra income lose.

She added: “With these brands, and I won’t say who they were, it was all about educating women, to make us feel good, but really they didn’t care, just my profile.

“I’m passionate about making people feel good. I realized they were missing out and it took a lot of balls to see it that way while my bank balance went one way and it went down.”

Andrea admits the loss of income has been troubling, but since leaving the series her book This Girl is On Fire has climbed to number 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list – proving her leap of faith has been positive.

Speaking of a potential return to LW, she added: “The door is always open to me, I appreciate that, but yeah, it’s definitely going to continue as a guest and 100% talk about things but not to work ‘Cause I do it a lot too.”

Viewers of the show were shocked when Andrea made her announcement in November 2020 and actually burst into tears as she described how she suffered a nervous breakdown.

She told viewers: “Last year I had a nervous breakdown and this year the world had a breakdown. This year I’ve been really strong mentally to deal with everything the pandemic has thrown at us.

“You get a life, do you live it the way you want? Are you brave? Do you do what you want?”