State Employees Credit Union: Fill & Download for Free

I highly recommend the Boeing Employees Credit Union (BECU) over any of the major banks (you don't have to be a Boeing employee anymore, just a resident of WA state). They provide excellent service, very good loan and credit card rates, and are both not for profit and entirely local.

Not me, but a co-worker. The majority of employees at my hospital belonged to the same credit union. We could use payroll deductions to pay back loans for things like cars. You can see where this is going.My co-worker, let’s call her N, had picked out her car. She went down to the credit union to sign in the paper work, and her loan officer struck up a conversation about the car she had chosen.This loan officer went on and on about how she had looked at that model of vehicle, but she had then decided to buy a different car, because of this and that.She spent the entire 15–20 minutes of signing critiquing N’s choice and was not really paying much attention to what she was doing. When all this was over, she gave N her check for the dealership, and N walked out furious.The first payment was supposed to come out the following month as a payroll deduction. N checked her paycheck, but there was no deduction. She contacted the credit union and explained that there was no deduction from her check. The customer service rep explained that they couldn’t see a loan that required a deduction. N grabbed her loan documentation and read the numbers off to the CSR. When they looked up the loan, they found that it had been marked as paid off in the system. The CSR transferred N to another department. When that person came into the phone they stated they understood the situation as explained by the CSR. This new rep stated that they would get the title sent out immediately!N tried to explain to the credit union multiple times over the next few months that she had never paid for this car nor any loan payments, but since the system was marked as paid, they couldn’t do anything to help her. The only thing they could do was to get another title issued to N.And that is how my co-worker ended up getting a brand-new car for free. Her only regret: she wished she had bought a more expensive car.

Yes, in part: you have largely described Credit Unions, which is a more common structure than one might suppose; in The United Kingdom these are known as Building Societies.In the USA, credit unions are only open to people who fit a set criteria (e.g. employees of a given company or people living in a given area), and credit unions obtain Bank Deposit Insurance from the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) rather than the FDIC.Credit unions have no shareholders - the members (depositors) are the shareholders, and they are explicitly Nonprofit Organizations. They are thus able to lend out at lower rates of interest to their membership, and pay higher rates of interest to their depositors (members). This is why commercial banks in the USA hate them passionately, and lobby against any and all changes to banking law that would allow credit unions to compete with commercial banks more vigorously.