Anyone switching to a credit union with what's going on?

[ApolloBoy]

I've been seriously thinking about switching over as well, mainly because I'm with Wells Fargo and I don't want to pay some asinine fee just to use my own money. Right now I'm divided whether or not to switch to a credit union or a community bank. I'm leaning more towards the former since my dad is a member of the credit union I'm thinking of, and I'm a student so joining one shouldn't be difficult. The only thing holding me back right now is my credit card balance which I still need to pay off.

[J T]

I appreciated what this person had to say. This is from a reader of The Stranger (an alternative newspaper here in Seattle) who goes by Goldy.

Unlike a lot of my whiny coworkers, I've thoroughly enjoyed doing business with Chase, our nation's second-largest bank. I've found the service more than adequate, the fees and rates perfectly reasonable, and the convenience—well, that's where big banks like Chase really kick ass: neighborhood branches throughout the city, no-fee ATMs around nearly every corner (more than 16,000 nationwide!), and online transfers and bill-pay that have completely transformed the way I bank. Hell, I can even deposit a check by snapping a photo of it with my iPhone. How cool is that?

In fact, I'd say that I have absolutely no complaints at all about banking with Chase, other than, you know, the way it has fucked my country.

Few banks were more complicit in, or profited more from, the financial collapse than JPMorgan Chase, a leading player in the real-estate-bubble-inflating subprime mortgage market and the main banker to imprisoned Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff. Earlier this year, Chase agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle US Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges, just days before the trustee representing Madoff's victims filed claims seeking $19 billion in damages. "JPMorgan Chase chose to enable Madoff's fraud," the trustee charged in a 155-page complaint, "not just through the various ways it participated in its activity, but by helping to cover Madoff's naked theft with the imprimatur of a globally recognized financial institution."

More recently, Chase was fined $88 million by the US Treasury in September for illegal wire transfers to Cuba and another $47 million by UK regulators in June. But of course those numbers are chump change compared to the $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout Chase received in 2008—the largest bailout amount awarded—money that CEO Jamie Dimon admitted at the time he intended to use to be "a little bit more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side," rather than for making the kinds of new loans necessary to help jump-start our economy. And that was after Chase had already scooped up troubled financial giants Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual at bargain-basement postcrash prices.

It was "WaMu," of course, that brought my accounts to Chase when the once high-flying, Seattle-based banking juggernaut collapsed in the largest bank failure in US history, allowing Chase to snatch its retail banking business for pennies on the dollar. According to a 2010 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report, WaMu executives knowingly created a "mortgage time bomb" by making subprime loans they knew would likely go bad and then fraudulently packaging them into risky securities. "Washington Mutual built a conveyor belt that dumped toxic mortgage assets into the financial system like a polluter dumping poison into a river," said Senator Carl Levin, the subcommittee chair.

And it wasn't just investors who WaMu brought low. WaMu exploited the Federal Reserve's post-9/11 cheap-money policy to transform itself into a predatory lending pioneer, aggressively marketing teaser rates and fanciful "option ARM" loans to low- and middle-income borrowers who could barely afford the less-than-interest- only minimum payments, let alone the balloon payments that inevitably followed. As a result, tens of thousands of families ultimately lost their homes to short sales and foreclosure, even as WaMu executives raked in record bonuses.

Thus, in a very real sense, the banking convenience I've long enjoyed has been subsidized by the suffering and exploitation of others, which I suppose makes me just as complicit in WaMu/Chase's abuses as those who casually do business with Mexican drug cartels are in that particular reign of terror. And yet every time I intended to close my accounts and put my money where my liberal mouth is, inertia (i.e., laziness) somehow always got in the way.

Until last weekend, when inspired and shamed by the Occupy movements on Wall Street and in Seattle, I spent a mere five fucking minutes filling out an online application form and finally opened an account at member-owned, not-for-profit, guilt-free BECU. It even transferred my opening balance directly out of my old Chase account. It was like magic. And, it turns out, nearly as convenient as the faceless giant I'm leaving, offering the same online banking services to which I've grown accustomed, plus a network of 28,000 surcharge-free ATMs nationwide, including deposit-taking ATMs at the many 7-Elevens scattered throughout Seattle.

I pass two 7-Elevens twice a day commuting to and from work. Oh thank heaven. What could be more convenient than that?

So fuck you, Chase, and good riddance. I'm keeping what little money I have here in my community, where it can be put to work on behalf of my neighbors, instead of ripping them off.

[MrPopo]

Someone explain to me why I should feel sorry for people who purchase beyond their means and then lose their stuff when they can't pay it off. Every time I see one of these articles talking about these people losing their homes I don't understand how I'm supposed to feel sympathy.

[o.pwuaioc]

Someone explain to me why I should feel sorry for people who purchase beyond their means and then lose their stuff when they can't pay it off. Every time I see one of these articles talking about these people losing their homes I don't understand how I'm supposed to feel sympathy.

That's not always the case. You're forgetting that millions lost their jobs thanks to the market crash. On top of that, those who purchased their homes on variable interest all of a sudden had to pay more. And then there are those unlucky ones who lost their jobs and whose monthly mortgage went up, all due to circumstances not within their control. To add insult to injury, the bankers and executives responsible for the crash escaped without civil penalty and were rewarded, as usual, with large bonuses. If the government won't punish those responsible for launching us into a global recession, then we, as a people, should. Otherwise, one day this shit might actually affect you.

[Luke]

My wife and I switched over to SECU yesterday afternoon.

[Hatta]

Someone explain to me why I should feel sorry for people who purchase beyond their means and then lose their stuff when they can't pay it off. Every time I see one of these articles talking about these people losing their homes I don't understand how I'm supposed to feel sympathy.

You don't have to feel sympathy. JP Morgan, Countrywide, etc., still broke the law by filing thousands of fraudulent mortgages. Then they packaged them into securities, and broke the law again by misrepresenting those securities. This has had extremely serious consequences for the economy as a whole. We have to hold them accountable, or they'll just do it all over again.

Don't you think people who break the law should go to jail? Or is that only for pot smokers?

BTW, I've been using a Credit Union for years, and I'm going out to march on city hall here in half an hour.

[Croooow!]

Someone explain to me why I should feel sorry for people who purchase beyond their means and then lose their stuff when they can't pay it off. Every time I see one of these articles talking about these people losing their homes I don't understand how I'm supposed to feel sympathy.

I don't feel sorry for people who purchase beyond their means and can't afford it but those who got screwed by the financial crisis are a different lot. Those people were told homes were the largest and most stable investment they would ever make. I feel sorry for them because the same type of people who sold adjustable rate mortgages were the same people who denied any housing bubble at all. So the people who are in trouble financially due to the housing and financial crises were affected by a lot of factors well beyond their control, unlike other people who wind up in debt because they buy stupid shit like jet skis and hot tubs.

[J T]

Someone explain to me why I should feel sorry for people who purchase beyond their means and then lose their stuff when they can't pay it off. Every time I see one of these articles talking about these people losing their homes I don't understand how I'm supposed to feel sympathy.

Step 1.) Give away all your possessions and money

Step 2.) Go get a low paying job that you hate with a salary at or near minimum wage

Step 3.) Attempt to live within your means

Step 4.) Fail at step 3 despite your best efforts.

Even this won't give you the authentic experience though because you already have an education and likely have some biologically bestowed natural gifts towards intelligence. We might have to consider a few frontal lobe lesions to give you a better sense of what it's like to have executive functioning deficits. I'd also suggest self-inflicting some damage to limbic system to make it more difficult to regulate your emotions too as many of the poorest people in this country often have problems with regulating emotion. Oh, and if you have a strong social support system, we need to do some damage to that too.

There is an alternative method that's less complicated, which just involves basic caring about your fellow man, but it sounds like you have a strange condition where every time you point your finger to blame, your heart closes up. So I'm sorry, we're going to have to take away everything you own and cut up your brain.

[saturnfan]

Well did anybody not see that this was going to happen? When you increase taxes or regulations upon a business, in this case the banks, they don't just bow down and take it as punishment... they find ways to recoup that lost revenue. How do you recoup those losses? Early, you pass them onto the consumer.

Now I'm not here to argue the merits for and against the bank reforms, but if you feel that the reforms were a positive and necessary measure, then you have to pay the cost for added security.

You guys made your bed, now sleep in it.

[J T]

Well did anybody not see that this was going to happen? When you increase taxes or regulations upon a business, in this case the banks, they don't just bow down and take it as punishment... they find ways to recoup that lost revenue. How do you recoup those losses? Early, you pass them onto the consumer.

Now I'm not here to argue the merits for and against the bank reforms, but if you feel that the reforms were a positive and necessary measure, then you have to pay the cost for added security.

You guys made your bed, now sleep in it.

No, you don't have to pay those costs. You can go to a credit union. That's the whole point.

And you seem to have missed the fact that it was the banks that crippled this economy and profitted considerably. They've made the bed, and now they should lie in it, not us.