Well, one of the drawbacks of using credit union became a reality for me yesterday. In what is a very very hot real estate market, we found a place in our new city after a month of looking but they wanted the security deposit immediately to hold the place. (Places go within hours of being listed).
My wife is still finishing up her job in our old city, and I did not bring the checkbook with me to the new city, which is five hours away. So I was left having to find a way to get a cashiers check and there was literally no way to get one from our credit union, which is the second largest in the state but has no branches within 4 hours of our new city. (The landlord said they would not accept cash or money orders, which were the first things that came to my mind).
In googling this issue, I found some websites where some people had faced similar issues but were able to obtain a cashiers check from a credit union of which they were not a member because their credit union was a member of a nationwide network that lets its customers use any other member credit union in the country to get a cashiers check or for other services. Unfortunately mine told me that they are not a member of any such network, so I was completely out of luck.
Again googling my problem, it turns out that some banks will give you a cashiers check if you walk in with the amount in cash. So my next thought was to wire the money to myself at Western Union, but of course they close at 4 o'clock and it was 4:30. Meanwhile, my wife had called several bank branches in the area, all of which said that they would not give a cashiers check to someone who just walked in off the street with a bunch of cash.
So we called Wells Fargo, with whom we have our mortgage, to see if there is any way we could get a cashiers check from them and they said they would only do a cashiers check for people with a checking account at their bank and that it would take days to open and fund the account and before they would allow us to withdraw any money anyway. So we were out of luck on that score.
However, I called my credit union one more time and it turns out you can do a transfer from your credit union account to someone else's account at another financial institution using a service called PopMoney (at least that is what my credit union uses for those types of transfers but it turns out just about every one of the national banks offers this, more on that in a minute) ....but the daily limit was $1000 less than the security deposit. So I was up a creek without a paddle yet again.
We ended solving the issue by doing a transfer from my wife's personal account at one of the large national banks to the realtor's account but I ended up burning hours at work and probably taking several years off my life expectancy because I was so anxious and stressed out that we were going to lose the place and not being able to find another.
The point of my story is that there can be drawbacks to using credit unions, one of which I found at the exact wrong time. I am not sure how often a situation like this will actually present itself but it scared the crap out of me nonetheless. This experience reflected a major shortcoming of credit unions, or at least the one we were using in our old city.
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