tl;dr at the end.
I was tired of getting charged a $27 "member privilege overdraft protection" fee, so I called and had them turn it off. I was told, "just so you know, once you turn it off, you can't turn it back on." I had lost hundreds because of that "privilege" fee, often one day before getting paid (which they don't care about), so of course I gave the okay to cancel it. It turns out, if you gave your routing and account number as a payment method and there is not enough in your account to cover the transaction, not only will they still charge you $27 for EACH transaction (as a "return transaction fee," as if it's not automated), but whatever institution the transaction was returned to can also charge a return fee. A real life example that happened to me: I had just over $3 in my checking account, which I was saving to make sure a recurring transaction would go through. That transaction was pending, as well as 3 other transactions. Members First Credit Union has some kind of program that saves up and processes all pending transactions at the same time. So, instead of being able to pay the $3 for the one transaction with only three declining, all four transactions declined and were returned. This caused me to lose $108 instantly. On top of that, the institution the $3 transaction was supposed to go to also charged me a $20 return fee. So I lost a total of $128 in an instant. If they had allowed the transaction to go through for which I had enough in my account, I would have saved nearly $50, which is a LOT of money when you're living paycheck to paycheck. That's about 2 weeks worth of groceries.
tl;dr Members First Credit Union are thieves and they don't care about you. If you're thinking about joining this bank, I implore you, look elsewhere. I did the math on how much I could have saved if I had started with a different bank more than a decade ago (when this bank was still called FedCom Credit Union) and it was THOUSANDS. read more
