News & Views from the best way to bank.
What if someone redesigned our currency? What would it look like?
The Dollar ReDe$ign Project explores this idea, with graphic artists posting new takes on the ol’ Greenback.
The above example is from Michelle Haft, and features bright colors and graphics celebrating the myriad engines of our economy (like energy, health care, and manufacturing).
What do you think? Would Americans be willing to change the classic “Dead Presidents” designs?
[Courtesy of ISO50 blog.]
Good news – we just put a new no-surcharge ATM in at Allegiance Health’s Foote Hospital.
You can find the American 1 ATM on the second floor, near the cafeteria. Now if you need cash for food or the gift shop, you can take advantage of our no-surcharge ATM. For a complete list of American 1 ATMs, visit our ATM Locations page.
A message from Jane Bryant Quinn and the National Credit Union Administration. Learn more about your share insurance on their site.
Check out pictures on our Flickr page.
Watch for it at this weekend’s Spring Women’s Expo!
Has your debit card been denied sometime in the past week?
There’s a reason, and – if you can believe it – it’s because of a single little number.
Certificates of deposit (CDs, or just certificates) have many faces, as the New York Times points out.
The story tells how even the plain vanilla certificate become involved in an $8 billion scandal. The thing is, that kind of CD differs from other kinds of CDs.
To start, you have your basic certificate: you give a bank or a credit union money, and they pay you a dividend when the certificate matures. You can’t touch the money until the term is up, however, without paying fees and penalties. They carry virtually no risk because you know what kind of interest your money will earn ahead of time. Even better, the NCUA covers your credit union certificate deposit up to $250,000. American 1 offers these types of certificates, and so do most other banks and credit unions.
After that, things get tricky. There are brokered CDs, where brokers pool investors’ money to get a better return; indexed CDs, that are coupled with “equity index such as the Standard & Poor’s 500 or the Dow Jones industrial average”; and many other types of CDs that offer a variety of returns and security options. Just know that not every certificate is as safe as the certificate of deposit.
Be sure to do plenty of research before you put your money in anything besides a plain certificate.
Two recent articles – one at the Washington Post and another at the Wall Street Journal – leave the impression that credit unions are receiving a bailout from the government, like banks and insurance companies.
But things aren’t always as they seem, and credit unions are not receiving a bailout. In fact, credit unions are doing much better than banks.
The two stories focus on an institution that services credit unions, U.S. Central Corporate Federal Credit Union, an institution that handles financing and transactions for a big group of credit unions. U.S. Central doesn’t service members, like you or your neighbor. It services other credit unions. Think of it as a credit union for credit unions.
But the way the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post make it sound (with headlines like “U.S. Aid Goes to Credit Unions”), the entire CU industry is in need of a handout. And that’s just not true.
What happened was U.S. Central took a group of credit unions’ money and invested it those mortgage-backed securities we keep hearing about. When those investments went sour, U.S. Central asked for a $1 billion loan (not bailout) from the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) – the same government agency that insures your deposits at American 1. This isn’t Congress handing money to a financial institution that made bad decisions – as has happened a lot since September. Instead, it’s credit unions stepping in and helping out one of their own institutions.
Does this affect you or your membership at American 1? Not at all. American 1 is doing well financially. In fact, we trust our deposits with the Federal Reserve because of its reliability.
While newspapers seek to build up interest in stories by writing provacative headlines, the WSJ and Post went a bit too far with their misleading headlines.
Who would’ve thunk it: a trucking magazine promoting credit unions.
Check out this article over at Overdrive magazine, called “Plugging holes in your checking account,” on how banks like to squeeze as much money out of customers with fees and “gotcha” penalties. Those interest-bearing checking accounts? Sometimes they’re not worth it.
Overdrive’s article concludes, “Move your business to a credit union.”
10-4!
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says there is one important lesson to be learned from the financial weirdness going on:
Despite the interrelated nature of the finance sector, credit unions are a safe and stable place to put our money. We ignore at our peril the lesson of the recent relative stability of credit unions…It is not just the fact that credit unions have better rates and didn’t indulge in precarious behavior. In credit unions [members], not investors, are sovereign.
Eric Bowman writes that the “financialization” of our economy – where money is made by moving funds around, not by producing anything of worth – is partly to blame for the housing, credit, and stock market mess. When banks strive for profit and not service, they make risky decisions.
Bowman argues that, by focusing on service, credit unions stay healthy for the long-haul.
The collapse of Washington Mutual was called the “biggest bank failure of all time,” meaning that – in today’s times – no one is “too big to fail.”
So it’s good to have a backup plan. That’s what blogger Khoi Vinh recommends, especially when it comes to anything you have stored online.
This advice is applicable to most areas of our lives: fire escape plans, fire-proof lock boxes for valuables, generators for power outages, etc. Planning “just in case” can be a real lifesaver.
Just this week, I had an instance where I’m glad we made a backup plan. Our marketing department stores our files (ads, newsletters, web site graphics, etc.) on a network disk. That network disk has failed before, and the first time we had no backup plan. We lost all our files in an instant. Then we started to store our files on our work computers, and copy them to the network disk. But that didn’t always happen, so when our network drive went down again, Marketing had a big scare. Luckily, we were able to recover most (but still not all) of our files.
After that crash, we bought an external hard drive to backup all of our files. I do this personally every other day or so: move files from the network disk to the external disk. So when we lost our network drive again this week (thankfully, only briefly), I didn’t freak out. We had a backup plan.
Do you? If you store files online, like we do over at our Flickr account, do you have them stored somewhere physical? What about your money? Do you have a few dollars of spare cash hidden somewhere, just in case? Maybe a spare gas can for those “uh oh” moments?
Vinh’s bigger point is that, anymore, no one is “too big to fail”:
The size of a company is certainly not a reliable shield against failure, but being small doesn’t necessarily guarantee a company will be around in the long term, either. I just don’t think that it’s realistic to assume that all of the data we’re storing online is safe. So a friendly reminder: back up.
He makes the point about online items (Facebook profiles, e-mail messages, banking information), but the point can go further to life in general.
What about American 1? What’s our backup plan?
For one, American 1 prepares for tough times by setting aside extra funds for things like delinquent loans. A lot of financial institutions get in trouble by not saving enough for a rainy day. Not us. We like to make sure there are enough reserves set aside to cover ourselves during times like these.
You know, just in case.
You don’t have to be a paranoid person to realize that unexpected things happen. A wise person will set time aside to think about the “what ifs” life throws at us, and plan for them as much as possible. That’s what American 1 is doing. How about you?
|
