Ok, I’m guessing it isn’t THE worst, but it is pretty bad.  If you happen to live in the Bloomington or surrounding areas and were thinking of moving your banking to Members Choice Federal Credit Union, let me advise to to rethink that decision.

I’ve had accounts there since 1995.  Over the years, they’ve served me well.  But no more.  Check this out.

For years, my preferred credit card has been my MCFCU Visa.  When I first signed up, I had a checking account, savings account and car loan with the bank. In exchange, they gave me a few points off the Visa interest rate. Yay!

But, now that they’ve closed several branches and removed most of their ATM machines, and I’m not frequently in the area, banking there became a major pain in the ass.   I decided to move my checking and savings to a more convenient bank, but meant to keep my credit card (that has a decent interest rate and sufficient line of credit).   I found out when I went to close the checking and savings that, in order to keep the CC, I had to keep either the checking or savings open.  Ugh.  So, I opted to leave the savings open and figured I would just maintain a balance of $30 or so and collect the .01% interest.

A few months went by when I received a notice that I no longer met the $25 minimum balance requirement for a savings account. I got online to check, and damned if they weren’t charging me a $3 monthly account maintenance fee because my overall deposit balance was less than $600!  This meant, from a big-picture point-of-view, I was paying a $36 annual fee just to have this stupid credit card!

Option #1 was to deposit $600 into their savings account to avoid the fees, but draw less than 1% interest.  Since nearly all decent online banks are offering 3.5% or better (even with Bernanke’s rate-cuts), that would be a sin.

Option #2, and the one I’m going with, is to cancel them all. 

The moral of the story: don’t let Members Choice screw you too.