Not all Credit Unions are Equal.....

I have been on a sort of quest....I think it might be simply to keep myself busy, I am not sure.

But I have had two things that have been occupying my mind as of late.....getting rid of two of my four cars (auto consolidation) and making a few changes to my financial infrastructure. (does that even sound like it makes sense?)

The auto consolidation is simple enough to GROK, but the tinkering with my money accounts and payment systems deserves a little explanation.

First, I have to get rid of my current CitiBank Mastercard. The CitiBank customer service rep. treated me like an idiot, and if ot were not for my asking a simple innocent question, he would have let me lose almost $1000 in rewards without so much as mentioning it. (and his reason was that I should be intimately aware of my contract.....to which I asked, what part of your job title..customer service....did they forget to explain to him in his training!)

Then mt second quest is to find a safe place to put some money for a short time, that will still earn a bit of interest.

I was also thinking of trying to get all my banking under the same online area...so that I could make all the payments and transfers online from the same account. (I currently have an AMEX card, a Mastercard and a Citizen Bank account....all online, but nothing is linked.)

So initially I was letting the credit card search sort of drive the other things, but I just found out tonight that I might want to let the rate of return on my CD be the driver instead.

It turns out that CD yields are not equal. I already belong to the USAlliance Credit Union at work. I joined because they gave me $10 to open the account. I opened it with something like $10 bucks, so I doubled my money that one say.

But it turns out USAlliance has a couple of nice things going for them.....a very low rate Visa Gold Credit card (7.99%) and a pretty high interest rate 15 month CD (5.34% APY).

As of last night I was thinking of opening a DCU account, but I might just go to USAlliance and drop the money in there for now.

I guess it pays to shop around. (duh.... :-)