If you own a CrossFit gym anywhere in these United States financial planner Ivan Havrylyan of Outside the Box Financial Planning, LLC, based in Chicago, is prepared to get you fiscally fit.
Although he has other clients as well, Havrylyan, 28, primarily caters to CrossFit gym owners that share his enthusiasm for the sport, which he credits for making him physically fit.
The symbiotic relationship was inevitable. “I let myself go completely in college,” Havrylyan recalls. “I got pretty fat, gaining 30 or 40 pounds since high school.”
Havrylyan graduated with an associate's degree in accounting from Harper College in Palatine, Ill., then went on to graduate early with honors from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, where he majored in finance.
After graduation, Havrylyan went to work for the next five years at a high-end, boutique financial planning firm in Park Ridge, Ill., where he had interned during his senior year. The firm serves upper middle-class individuals nearing retirement with at least $500,000 in investable assets.
A sedentary lifestyle began to take its toll on his health and outlook, Havrylyan said, and he saw his own mortality mirrored in the declining health of his clients. In one case, Havrylyan’s client, a former teacher, took ill and ended up in a nursing home at great cost to his family. Havrylyan said that if the man had not died when he did, the cost of his health care would have bankrupted his family.
“It shocked me that these folks that worked their whole life saving for their retirement had to pay so much for their health care expenses,” he said. “Their quality of life was no longer there.”
Havrylyan began to examine his own physical condition as well. He did not like what he saw.
“I asked myself, ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to get into healthier shape now, instead of working, working, working?’” Havrylyan said.
In 2014, he put thought into action by joining a CrossFit gym near his office in Park Ridge, Ill. Havrylyan said that every day’s workout was different and took only an hour a day. More importantly, he said, CrossFit offered him a holistic approach to living a healthy life.