We’re here to help members save money — in fact, the average savings per household was $214 last year when comparing credit unions to banks.¹ But that doesn’t mean we want to stop where we are now. We aim to continue helping members keep more money in their pockets and are always looking for new ways to do so. That’s why we analyzed our fee schedule and made the decision to eliminate six fees, effective March 2023.

We’ve eliminated six fees.

Serving people, not profit, comes with the responsibility to work toward both the financial sustainability of the collective membership and the financial growth of individual members. While this responsibility does include charging certain necessary fees to maintain fiscal accountability with our members’ money, it also includes the duty to make sure any fee that gets charged is not only justifiable but necessary.

Julie Dean, VP of Treasury, said, “We recognize that in being true to our direction of making a difference in the financial well-being of our members, we needed to find ways to provide more to them. So, one of those ways was looking at our fees and finding where we could make changes.” We’ll no longer be charging the following fees:

• Account Service Fee: Remember the $10 monthly fee that applied when you didn’t meet certain account criteria? You can forget about it.
• Checkless Checking Fee: We want our Checkless Checking Account to be a super affordable option for anyone looking for simple, no-cost checking.² No more $5 fee here.
• Statement Copy Fee: This $4 fee used to cover the cost of a replacement copy of a monthly statement.³
• Check Copy Fee: As the name implies, this $2 fee was formerly applied if you needed a copy of a check.
• Coin Deposit Fee: We used to charge a percentage-based fee for rolled coin deposits. Now, you can bring us that quarters-and-nickels collection whenever you’re ready to deposit it, fee-free.
• Returned Check Deposit Fee: It’s not fun when a check someone’s written to you bounces unexpectedly, so we don’t want to make that experience worse by charging a $35 fee.

What does this all mean for our membership? In total, we estimate that eliminating these six fees will save our members about $2.5 million over the course of a year. That’s more money in your pocket and less spent on fees.

Why these specific fees?

We looked at all our fees to decide where to start and find out what would make the most impact. Dean said, “We considered feedback from our members and team members, as well as Member Contact Center data. For these fees in particular, many of our members getting charged are the very same we’re really trying to help obtain financial security and financial opportunities. We’re hoping this action can make a big impact on our membership — providing more ways for members to grow.”

We aren’t stopping here either. We’ll be continuing to look for additional ways to help our members save money while working for the collective good of the membership.

Accounts are subject to approval.
¹Per household annually. CUNA U.S. Membership Benefits Report, Q3 2022. Accessed February 17, 2023. https://www.cuna.org/advocacy/credit-union—economic-data/data—statistics.html
²You cannot use paper checks on this account. Any check written will be returned unpaid, even if you have sufficient money in your account.
³We still charge a $4 monthly statement fee to cover the cost of printing and postage on paper statements. Members aged 12 and under, and members aged 65 and older, are exempt from the paper statement fee. To avoid the paper statement fee altogether, members can subscribe to eStatements, which provides digital statements.

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