I like the idea of a less profit-driven business that is maybe more community-focused but I wonder if they have the same capability as a bank? Have you been able to do your banking needs at a credit union? Was the customer service decent?
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Great, yes, yes, yes.
They have a coop shared branch service that means you can go into any participating one and do any banking needs.
I pay nothing for banking/checking and I get great rates on savings acct and CDs.Definitely worth it. I’ve never had a problem with overdraft fees, BS by for-profit executives, and my credit union certainly never needed to be bailed out by the federal government.
I love the two I’ve been with since the early oughts. One is state employee, the other a federal one.
I mostly use the federal for everything, but keep an account at the state one for a few things here and there.
Never have any issues worth noticing, though ATM availability without fees was a hassle in the past. Just weren’t that many available back then, but that’s changed.
Could complain about their apps being pretty bad, but that’s every bank app I’ve seen or heard about.
Never have any delays in transfers, no crazy fees, excellent interest rates for credit and savings/checking.
I’ve also never had anything even remotely bad with customer service. Tbh, there’s so few issues that I could take one shoe off to count how many times I’ve needed that kind of thing. I’d have toes left over.
My best friend, his husband, a friend of ours, my wife, dad, and sister all use one or the other of those two, and zero issues, so it isn’t just me being charming af and/or lucky.
I have a savings account with a credit union, they can offer some pretty good rates and will generally have a very open investment strategy. Customer service has been rather good, at least when accessed via phone. I don’t think my union offers things like current accounts, but I hear some do.
You experience is going to be heavily dependent on your specific union, they tend not to have as much money to throw around as major banks do, so don’t expect a bespoke app or anything like that.
I was with a semi-local one until recently because they had some pretty hefty account access fees (got charged $40 in a month for what I would consider normal card usage). As much as they had a “give back to the community” initiative behind them I just couldn’t justify that financially.
The one I’m with now advertises itself as a “bank” and seems to be more national but they’re still a CU. No monthly access fees, the same level of great service, local branch, they’ll donate to a local charity of your choice free of charge, just generally more satisfied with them overall.
Both seemed to use the same general app which seems to be getting around the CUs and it seems to work fairly well for checking balances and transferring funds. Also works fine on phones that don’t run Google services with SafetyNet and all that.
I have, until recently, tried to bank only with credit unions. I have had a couple of poor experiences but nothing awful enough to get me to go back to banks.
As with anything else, do your homework. Not all credit unions are the same and not all are run well.
What you need from a credit union will help determine your choice. A couple near me focus on home mortgages while another is all about CDs and savings.
I do my own investing and found myself using CashApp more and more for lots of things and ended up closing my credit union account because I was getting just as good a deal on ATMs and services I used frequently.
I’ve had quite a few credit unions. I learned early on that there’s a banking regulation that prevents banks from pulling a payment that you didn’t specifically authorize for a loan or credit card from a checking/savings account at the same bank regardless of how overdue it is.
I also learned the hard way that Credit Unions are exempt from this and the MFs caused me to nearly miss a rent payment, yes yes debts are debts and you should pay them, but sometimes you need to prioritize limited funds and an unsecured credit card payment is almost always going to be rock bottom compared to a fucking rent or mortgage payment. And no, they would not reverse the payment they took.
I did learn a valuable lesson though, spread your accounts fucking everywhere. A checking at one bank, a savings at a different one, auto loan somewhere else, credit cards somewhere else. Thanks NFCU! Because of you I now have a WEB of accounts lmao
Other than that, CUs are nearly always lacking on the tech side of things and make asinine decisions like not being able to set your own username on account creation and have to wait on your “User ID” (probably account number) to be mailed to you.
Customer service is usually good, as long as you don’t expect longer CS hours, usually closes around 8PM. Rates are good, lower fees and not nearly as many BS fees and that almost makes up for the cons
Fair enough but if you have the means, NFCU has almost no cost. I get something small but like .4% interest on my checking account. Their credit card has no annual fee and I average $800 a year in cash back benefits from it. Other than buying paper checks, I’ve not paid them one penny for any services, a way better deal than I was getting at BofA.
I also learned the hard way that Credit Unions are exempt from this
Wow… there’s a gem of knowledge for sure.
Have NFCU for my mortgage and car loan and it is absolutely astonishing to see how behind they are in tech. To set up autopay on the car note they wanted me to send in a form and wait something like 6 weeks, and I got no interest discount or anything for doing it. Ended up setting up autopay through my regular bank online in about 3 minutes and said forget it.
I’ve predominantly used a credit union my whole adult life. The one I use is smaller so loans and such have a higher threshold to meet. It also means that the interest rates are negligible on my accounts (0.01%), however I’ve also never really had any issues with them, their service, or locations. I’ve never had to deal with any fees, or transaction disputes.
There is one perk that I wish they had that you’ll really only find at the big banks: international free ATM withdrawal. While niche, if you travel a lot it might be worth it to set up an account with a bigger bank that supports that, even if the account is only used for travel.
it’s nice
they speak my language which is nice
aside from that, they’ve got really good rates on loans, though not so much on savings accounts
To be fair, a savings account at chase gets less than 1% apr last time I checked
Why compare to Chase? There are plenty of online banks that have high savings rates. Ally, for example, is currently 4.2%, and my Sofi account is currently 4.5%. I honestly just use my Fidelity brokerage account as my checking and savings, and I get ~5% on each (whatever money markets are currently doing).
Get a fee-free account at a bank or CU with branches for cash transactions and maybe loans, but keep the bulk of your cash at a higher-yielding bank.
Mine does have the same capabilities as a chain bank, but admittedly it took them a little longer to implement online features. The customer service is excellent. Because they’re a smaller organization, I can speak to an actual human who can personally and immediately solve my problem much quicker.
About the same as a decent bank. That said, I almost never need to actually talk to a human and almost never get loans (my only loan is my mortgage), so you may have a better experience if you do need to engage with a banker more frequently.
I personally use my Fidelity brokerage account as my main bank. My cash is invested in money market funds at rest (currently nearly 5%, and the “brokerage” works as “checking”), their debit card has no foreign transaction fees, and their credit card is one of the best (2% cash back and no foreign transaction fee). However, they don’t offer loans outside of margin loans, so I can’t go there to get financed for a car or something. I also have an account at a local bank, mostly so I can deposit cash and withdraw specific denominations (we keep cash around for babysitters). That used to be a local credit union, but the bank had a signup bonus so I ended up switching.
I really liked my credit union when I was younger though. I had BECU (WA only I think), and they got me my first credit card and had really friendly staff. But I currently don’t have a CU account anymore because I interact with banking services so infrequently.
The important things I look for in a bank/CU are:
- fees - either no fees, or fees are really easy to avoid
- ATMs - do they reimburse ATM fees? If not, how prevalent are their ATMs? If it’s a CU, do they participate in the co-op network?
- branch locations - if I need branch services, how easy is it to access them? If I expect to need branch services, how are their reviews?
- interest rates - less important since you can always open an online bank account and transfer cash back and forth
There are good banks and bad banks, as well as good credit unions and bad credit unions. Don’t just assume a given bank/credit union is good/bad just because it’s a bank/credit union, look for reviews online and ideally talk to people with experience with that particular org. The best option is probably a mix of two orgs, one with a good savings rate and one with convenient services. You probably won’t get a significantly different loan rate from a credit union vs a bank, and you can always shop around at banks/credit unions you don’t have a relationship with.
I personally have a bunch of accounts because I like to go for signup bonuses, and the only ones I really think people should avoid are the mega banks (in order of worse to less bad: Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Key Bank, Chase; Chase is okay if you can reliably avoid fees). You should never pay for a bank account, that’s just dumb.
fees - either no fees, or fees are really easy to avoid
Try getting out of the paper statement fee at a CU. That’s an important one because when the enshitification of their tech crosses your threshold of tolerance, it’s important to have agency to instantly go back to analog. Having that power also creates pressure on them to not enshitify their tech in the first place.
Gratis paper statements seem much less common at CUs than commercial banks.
Also regarding fees: very hard to find CUs that give a zero FX fee when pulling cash from a foreign ATM. IIRC, there is only one CU in the US (Penfed?) that has fee-free foreign currency.
Chase is okay if you can reliably avoid fees
Unless you consider ethics. Chase is one of the worst.
You should never pay for a bank account, that’s just dumb.
I used to think that. But in my boycott on free technofeudal pushers (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) I’ve evolved to prioritize privacy (and thus control) over non-transparent exploitation of my data. Have you thought about why your billpay service is free? It’s outsourced, so the billpay service has to make money somehow. Of course they are selling your data. Google and Amazon want to know about people’s offline purchases so they know whether it traces to an online ad.
Large ones are just banks with a caveat and small ones are like small banks but I find they tend to have better interest rates and such. Work ones are handy as they tend to have branches located in relation to the work such that you can more easily do something on lunch or such.
I don’t get why folks even care about interest rates when they are so negligably low anyway. When interest rates are ≤1%, I would rather get zero interest just to silence the excessive reporting, like a 1099-int for a couple dollars which serves as a kind of heartbeat signal for where your assets are kept and then having to pay your accountant to declare it. Not worth it. I would rather see the 1% go to a good cause, if not toward just improving the banking service.
You can get over 1% currently now that the fed has the cental interest rates above zero. I mean its easy enough to not get interest. You can find checking accounts with zero interest even when rates are very high and you never need fear the 1099 then.
I’m done with credit unions. They just create the illusion of a small org but then farm you out to big companies via outsourcing anyway.
- Most credit unions have outsourced just about every aspect of their business. They are like shell companies all working as many different façades to the same giant corporations. CUs in-house expertise doesn’t go far beyond their branding and marketing. Your sensitive financial info gets shared around with a handful of giant corporations while giving the illusion that you have the privacy benefits of a small CU.
- billpay outsourced to 1 or 2 different billpay services nationwide
- monthly statement generation: outsourced to the same few corps
- statement printing: outsourced, then they charge you for it
- Credit unions spam the shit out of whatever email address you supply, thus enabling all entities handling the email to see where you bank each time the CU decides to spam you. Commercial banks are better on this in my experience. I think commercial banks have calculated that spam just angers people and drives them off, whereas credit unions are either not diligent enough to make that calculation or they are assuming their small org appearance will go a long way in obtaining forgiveness.
- Most credit unions have put their website on Cloudflare in the past few years. Which means:
- Consumers are generally forced to expose their account credentials to a privacy-abusing tech giant (while agreeing to be accountable for damage stemming from credential leakage)
- Consumers are generally forced to expose to their credit union their approximate physical location every single time they connect to the website as a consequence of Cloudflare. Which means if they move outside of the CUs service area some CUs will notice that and even freeze/lock the account. They tend to admit directly in their privacy policy that they collect IP addresses specifically for geolocation tracking of their customers.
- Consumers are generally forced to expose to their ISP where they bank as a consequence of Cloudflare. And considering Trump overturned an Obama policy that required ISPs to obtain consent for collecting and selling customer personal data, there is nothing to stop your ISP from selling info about where you bank to data brokers and debt collectors. Biden did not reverse Trump’s privacy sabotage.
- Cloudflare can at any moment decide to block you for any reason arbitrarily, and suddenly your web access to your money is gone.
- Consumers who are behind CGNAT outside of their control are often blocked by Cloudflare. If a snot-nose script kiddie in your CGNAT pool decides to scrape some websites, CF’s excessive protectionism might kick in and block the IP which could go to you next, and you lose access to your money because CF overreacted to a harmless snotnose kid.
Being free from Cloudflare sometimes means you can login over Tor and avoid most of the problems above. OTOH many commercial banks also block Tor increasingly more frequently lately (because they also want to track your physical whereabouts). There may be some Cloudflare-free CUs that still permit Tor logins though it’s becoming harder to find them.
Gratis paper statements are important more than you realise:
If you cannot find a bank or CU that gives you the privacy of Tor, the best feature to look for is gratis paper statements and paper checks so you can scrap the website and take back your privacy. It’s more common to find gratis paper statements from banks than CUs. As enshitification of the web proliferates and more FIs join Cloudflare, gratis paper statements is an important safety net so you can ditch their tech the moment it goes sour.
Regarding apps:
Credit unions do not write their own software. You have just a few closed-source Google Playstore banking app makers who all the credit unions outsource to. Whereas every commercial bank reinvents the wheel with their own implementation. For me it’s a shitshow no matter what. I am not going to enter Google Playstore and tell Google where I bank and let Google track exactly which software version I have which also reveals what vulns I inherit, to then run a closed-source app that snoops on me in countless unknown ways. Fuck all that.
- Most credit unions have outsourced just about every aspect of their business. They are like shell companies all working as many different façades to the same giant corporations. CUs in-house expertise doesn’t go far beyond their branding and marketing. Your sensitive financial info gets shared around with a handful of giant corporations while giving the illusion that you have the privacy benefits of a small CU.
I’m good with mine. Feels like a normal bank. My money is still insured (I don’t recall how. I think it’s not FDIC. You’d have to check.) Their terms for a HELOC were more favorable and usually when you get a mortgage, the bank sells it immediately. But my credit union has held it the whole time. Also when some banks were getting bailed out, it was business as usual for my credit union. I’m not certain, but I think there are different rules for them as to how much cash they have to have relative to their deposits. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.
On the down side, it was more difficult to transfer large funds than from my brokerage and I think they offer fewer services. My credit Union for instance doesn’t offer bridge loans.
I have accounts at two credit unions. One I love, one is okay.
The first one has excellent customer service and was doing online banking before most banks even thought it existed - they had software you’d use to dial into their system with your modem. Obviously that has gone by the wayside but they have an excellent, full featured site. Rates are generally competitive. (Unfortunately I live in a different state than they are based in, so I can’t get my mortgage through them any more - they used to do it, but stopped offering mortgages in my state years ago.) They have nice touches, like if you withdraw cash from an ATM that isn’t theirs, they’ll refund the ATM fees you were probably charged.
The other credit union is fine. No major complaints really, but after the experience with the first one, the second one just doesn’t compare. Their website is functional and covers all the normal pieces of online banking, but doesn’t have nearly the features the other one does. I probably wouldn’t know what’s missing if I hadn’t used the first one.
We also have a regular bank. No major complaints with them either, but it’s not one of the biggies like Chase. One of the few remaining regional bank chains.
