| rev:text
| - 15 years ago I joined AZ CU as a student and got screwed over. There was a $500 minimum balance requirement for my checking account. I once got $20 out of the ATM to pay for food. The ATM (it was their own) did not warn me that this would take my account below the $500 mark, it just gave me the money. They charged me like $30 in "overdraft" fees the next day, as if I had gone into the negative. I complained and got nowhere with their unfriendly customer service. I decided to close the account and go to a commercial bank. Their customer service didn't even try to change my mind or offer to reconsider those phony overdraft fees.
After the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, I was disgusted with the big banks and decided to give AZ CU another chance, only to discover over time that things hadn't improved much. I got a checking account from them, then a home loan.
I had hoped that with a credit union, things would work differently than with a bank, specifically:
1. that a human being would review my loan application and be able to make an individual decision (I'm an immigrant whose decades of excellent foreign credit history are treated as non-existent by the American credit reporting industry)
2. that AZ CU would hold my loan in their own portfolio rather than sell it
3. that AZ CU would service my loan (rather than make me the involuntary subject of a 3rd party mortgage servicer)
4. provide a single point of contact if there were any problems
5. not pull any bait and switches on fees and interest rates.
I was disappointed on all 5 counts.
1. My "loan officer" turned out to be just a glorified salesperson with no power to make a decision or decide an interest rate. Those decisions were made, just like with the banks, in a back office by someone I wasn't allowed to know or talk to, or by a computer that set my interest rate using a one size fits all formula based on my credit scores.
2. and 3. AC CU sold off my loan immediately to Fanny Mae and involved a third party mortgage servicer - exactly what I wanted to avoid. I haven't had any problems yet - no purposely 'lost' payments so the servicer can soak you with fees or even engineer a default - but I specifically chose a credit union because I wanted to avoid the chance of all of that in the first place, and I didn't want my money to be part of the same corrupt system that brought us the meltdown of 2008.
4. Just recently when I wanted to change my home insurance (which is being paid through escrow) I contacted the AC CU officer who had originally helped me to set up my insurance and asked for help.
She was bitchy and unhelpful- "Please contact the servicing department and they should be able to assist you with that" - was the first response, and when I wanted to know how to contact said service department (the website only had generic contact information), instead of giving me a phone number or email, she just responded with "Contact that number and they should be able to transfer you directly to servicing."
So much for friendly service and the hope for single point of contact.
5. Throughout my mortgage application process, I was promised a 3% interest rate. Even on the day the loan was issued, their website showed a 3% interest rate for my loan and someone with my credit score. But that interest rates was no longer available for me - mine had gone up to 3.5% that day. The site kept showing 3% for days or weeks afterwards.
I tried to persuade my loan officer that if the website showed 3%, then I ought to get 3%, but to no avail. She first lied and claimed that the website was showing 3.5%, then she insisted that somehow, the published rate was wrong, and in any event, she had no power to change anything.
Bottom line: their way of doing business is really no different from that of a commercial, for-profit bank as far as I can see, and they're often unfriendly and rude on top of that.
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