For most athletes, attending college with a sports scholarship has more to do with their chosen sport than with the course they actually take at school. Many of them even drop out of college to become professional athletes. Lara Spencer has a story that is the opposite, as she pursued a career in her field of study and gave up her career in athletics.
Lara Spencer is best known for her appearance as co-host of the ABC show Good Morning America, in which she has participated since 2002. However, the television personality has also worked for other stations, including the rival of her parent network, CBS. She spent a few years at WABC-TV as a presenter for their lifestyle segment, then a few more years at PBS’s Antique Roadshow.
Most recently, she was the host of HGTV’s flea market flip. In April 2018, the journalist revealed that she would slow down her GMA appearances in order to take more time for her career as a television producer.
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Lara Spencer Bio
Spencer spent her life until her teenage years in Garden City, a suburb of New York on Long Island. She was born on June 19, 1969, as Lara Christine von Seelen. During her education, she attended Garden City High School and then Pennsylvania State University, where she enrolled to study broadcast journalism.
Even before college, she was an athlete in the field of springboard and platform jumping. During her time in Pennsylvania, she became a nationally recognized competition diver and was even appointed to the All American Athlete Team in her senior year.
After graduating in 1991, she joined NBC’s Page program to gain experience and make contacts within the industry. Soon after, she got her first job with a local television station in Tennessee, WDEF-TV, which was a partner of CBS. Here she fulfilled all kinds of roles, from a reporter, editor, and producer to cameraman and news van driver.
After a year with the station, she moved to News 12 and two years later to WABC-TV. Her biggest role to date came in 1999 when she was recruited by ABC as a national correspondent for Good Morning America.
In addition to her involvement in over 1600 episodes of Good Morning America from 2002 to 2018, the journalist has been featured on a number of other talk shows, reality shows, game shows, and seasonal films. Some of these include Rachel Ray, The Muppet’s, The $100,000 Pyramid, Piers Morgan Tonight, Gary Unmarried, The Wendy Williams Show, Antiques Roadshow, The Early Show, and many others.
Lara Spencer’s work as a television producer has led to her creating and producing It’s Worth What? for NBC. It was a game show that was broadcast in the summer of 2011 and hosted by Cedric The Entertainer. In 2012 she produced I Brake for Yard Sales, an interior design show, in collaboration with HGTV. Spencer then continued this with Flea Market Flip, a show that originally aired on HGTV and later on Great American Country.
Lara has also tried her hand at writing and has published two books: I Brake for Yard Sales (2012) and Flea Market Fabulous: Designing Gorgeous Rooms with Vintage Treasures (2014).
Is She Married? Who is Her Husband?
Lara Spencer has tied the knot twice in her life. Her first marriage was to David Hanffenreffer, a journalist who was once on CNN’s list. She married him on September 30, 2000, and in the following years, the union produced two children. The first, Duff, was born in 2002, and the second, Kate, came in 2004. Fifteen years after their marriage, in March 2015, Lara and David announced that their marriage had ended. Three months later they completed the divorce proceedings.
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The following year, a mutual friend set Spencer up on a blind date with businessman Rick McVey. Rick is the CEO of the Fintech company MarketAxess. They soon began dating, and in January 2018 Lara revealed that she had accepted the businessman’s proposal. They were married on September 1, 2018, in Vali, Colorado.
What are Lara Spencer Salary and Net Worth?
Lara may be best known for her work on Good Morning America, but she also works for other networks and even owns and runs her own production company. Apparently, she has many stores that spit out money on an annual basis. According to the cheat sheet, the journalist has a salary of $3 million and a net worth of $9 million.