So we finally, via Margie’s taking action, we’ve started the process of moving our banking from WaMu (slowly, clumsily, turning into Chase) to a local credit union.
Bellco was founded as a credit union in 1936 for the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Co. When Ma Bell got broken up in the 80s, Bellco was able to expand to other companies that wanted to offer it as a benefit, which includes Margie’s employer. We’ve been using Bellco as our secondary bank for quite a number of years for car loans (it’s also been our savings plan, since Margie’s kept her direct deposit for the car loan into a savings account there even though the car loan’s been paid off for a few years).
I like credit unions (which have tended to focus more on, well, banking services than Making Big Bucks in Speculative Loans), and Margie said the service she got walking into a branch near her office to start up a checking account was excellent. There’s also a Bellco branch across the street from my office, so we’re talking pretty high levels of convenience here.
The really funny thing is that, after Margie got home, we brought in the mail and found a letter from Bellco suggesting that we might want to open up a checking account with them, describing exactly the account we got (based on the amount we have in the saving). Plenty of nice, free services.
We probably won’t shift the rest of our stuff over from Chase to Bellco until after our impending trip — and we probably won’t move the home loan from Chase, since it’s actually a home equity line of credit at a ridiculously good rate … but whatever else we can do to extricate ourselves from Chase’s ham fingers (and I still don’t trust its finances, regardless) will be done in a timely fashion before the old WaMu is fully integrated into Chase in October (which would force us to change all our account numbers anyway, so why not make the switch now?).
(Though that would mean that we’d be able to finally use Chase ATMs to deposit money to our accounts, which seems like a remarkably good idea that they haven’t figured out how to presently do. Feh.)
I don’t know about BellCo, but Metrum is part of a consortium of credit unions that offers a great selection of free ATMs. Part of our travel planning is always to pull a list of free ATMS where we are going on our trip. Beats the heck out of local banks with no free ATM options outside their region (can you tell I’ve experienced this?)
Copying from the web site:
To be honest, ATMs are not a big issues for us, since so much of what we do is (rightly or wrongly) on plastic. Still, pretty cool, and there’s often (when traveling) some reason to have cash.