Move your Money!

[jonsonite]

As you might imagine, I agree with what I read on the Huffington Post about half the time. Here's a great piece on moving your money from big national banks to small community banks, to cut down on the shenanigans:

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional

Comments

Here here!

[triath]

WSECU belongs to the community of ATMs with over 28,000 locations. I'm extremely happy with them.

Re: Here here!

[yampowered]

I was gonna mention that too! I found out allll about the co-op system when I thought I was stranded in Kentucky with no ATM card - I was able to save my butt by making a withdrawal from a co-op participant. As in, I was actually able to go into a random bank in Ohio and the tellers treated me as if I was at Ent FCU in Colorado Springs.

Then I found my card under the seat. :D

Re: Here here!

[jonsonite]

That's awesome!

Re: Here here!

[jonsonite]

I love them so much.

yes.... THIS!

[mickeysacks]

I agree completely and wish more people would actually do this. When I moved to Boston I moved all my accounts to a local bank here that has only 7 branches... it's a little bit more of a pain to get to a physical branch when I need to (about a 25 minute drive from my new house to the nearest one) but it is totally worth it knowing that I'm keeping my money in my community. I also especially love that when I call the bank with a question I talk to a person right here at my branch, not in some vast customer-service center somewhere in India.

And my bank is pretty cool about ATM fees since they know they are small and less conveniently located than the behemoths like BofA... They don't charge me anything to use "foreign" ATMs and they'll credit me back any ATM fees I'm charged by other banks (up to 4 times a month).

The only sad part is that we couldn't get our home loan through them because as a small bank they were dropped by their Private Mortage Insurance company and we didn't have the full 20% down payment.

Re: yes.... THIS!

[jonsonite]

Yeah, they don't do everything, but for most purposes they're sufficient.

Re: yes.... THIS!

[triath]

I got my mortgage through WSECU and I got a sweet deal and exceptional customer service.

[sonofzeal]

Isn't this just a temporary fix though? If these smaller banks draw customers from the larger banks, they'll eventually become the larger banks. Why would they behave any differently at that scale than the present large banks do?

[jonsonite]

Well...there's only a handful of large banks, and hundreds or thousands of small ones. So even if we all switched over, they still wouldn't get too big.

Or we'd just make more banks...

[sonofzeal]

That's a very good point.

[pruneduchess]

also (and i'm not super educated about this, but this is my understanding) credit unions will always be different from banks because they're not for profit.

[cupkate]

One thing I don't like about BECU (I recently moved over from Wamu>Chase) is that I can't have a real-live teller interaction. I have to wait a few days for checks to get cashed (they told me it would almost always be instant, but in practice, it's totally not), which can be rough when I'm splitting a hefty rent and our landlord only wants one check.
And the ATM thing can be a bust. I know its part of a huge network, but in a lot of places I haunt, there's only big names.
That said, I feel much more secure with them and my interest rates are WAY BETTER.

[pruneduchess]

thanks for this jon - i've been thinking about switching to BECU from BOFA for a while now, and I needed a little reminder of the extreme goodness of such a thing.