Offer at a glance
- Interest Rate: 7.00% APY
- Minimum Balance: $1,000
- Maximum Balance: $7,000
- Availability: Anyone can join with a $5 share, more info below
- Hard/soft pull: Hard
- Credit card funding: None
- Monthly fees: None
- Insured: NCUA (60238)
The Offer
- Great Lakes Credit is offering a 7-month CD with a promotional rate of 7.00% APY.
- Max $7,000 deposit in this CD.
Eligibility
Anyone is eligible for the credit union by selecting ‘Let Us Help’ and putting in a $5 share. (Should be able to get that money out when you close out your relationship with the credit union.) The following are eligible without buying a share:
- Those who live in various parts of Illinois
- Military and family
- Federal employees and family
The Fine Print
- $1,000 minimum to open the account.
- $7,000 maximum deposit.
- Promotion effective November 19 – November 30, 2018.
- One certificate per member.
- IRAs and President’s Club bonus are ineligible.
Our Verdict
You’ll get around $285 over the course of the CD, versus around $81 in a 2% savings account. Really nice offer here. There is the downside of the hard pull, but a lot of us don’t care much about those anymore (raises hand). For me there’s the issue of the time/hassle of opening another banking relationship. Not sure what I’ll do, but it’s well worth considering.
Some people may already have a membership to the credit union from an old rewards checking account deal they have/had. Might not be a hard pull for those with an existing relationship (I think/guess the hard pull is for joining the credit union).
Hat tip to reader Anon
My CD matured on Saturday, and Sunday I was hit with a $5 fee. My ACH pull from Alliant is already in process, so I guess I’m going to get hit with even more fees. I messaged GLCU. This account is definitely getting closed as soon as I get my money.
storm, what is the fee for? Were you doing the requirements for the 3%? If you do not do the direct deposit or debit card transactions, or pay a bill, then there is no monthly fee nor minimum balance. Can you explain why you received a fee?
I had $5+ in the Share Savings until my CD matured on 6/29. My guess is when GLCU did the end-of-month processing, the system determined I was down to the one deposit product (Share Savings) and my average daily balance was just under $500 and imposed the monthly fee. It says “Fee W/D: SAVINGS MO. FEE.” My unfortunate timing I suppose.
My ACH transfer should go through ok. I think I missed it until Mint.com alerted me.
From the GLCU fee schedule pdf:
“Inactive Account Fee ……………. $15.00 per quarter
An account is considered inactive if for one year no withdrawals, deposits or payments other than dividends have been made to the account. The fee is waived if you have an aggregate balance of $500.00 or a service of the Credit Union such as a Share Certificate, IRA or Trust account, have a Young Adult Account, GrandAdvantage Club account, or are younger than 16 years old.”
“Savings Only Membership….. $5.00 per month unless each month you maintain a $500.00 direct deposit, a $500.00 average daily balance, OR an additional GLCU deposit or loan product.”
(It’s the second one that got you this time.)
When I signed up for the CD and savings, I also opened a tiny checking account, it has no minimum balance so I just have $5 in there. I will be setting up small transfers back and forth to avoid inactivity.
As I feared, I was hit with a $29 overdraft fee as well. My ACH transfer seems to have completed successfully though. Online Customer Service reversed the $5 and $29 fees and is closing the account and mailing me a $5 check. He/she said it was because my average daily balance was just under $500. If my CD had matured a day or two earlier, or their system gave you a few days grace, I probably would have been ok.
I’m not happy with my overall experience. When I first opened the account, I was hit with the overdraft fee because GLCU processed my trial deposits and withdrawals before my initial deposit. I had to use Google and read through fine print in a PDF to find out the gotchas when it should be right there on the website. I also never found my statements in the online banking platform. I printed the transaction logs for my records. I have never encountered such a antiquated fee-hungry credit union in my life.
I am sorry to hear that. I guess I am lucky that my CD matured on 6/28. So I did not get hit with fees. CD balance was transferred to my saving account on the same day. Then I pulled all but $5 in my saving account. I sent a message to their customer service requesting to close my account. Today I got email back telling me that I got a response in my message box. The problem is, now I cannot log into my online account. I think when they close my account, I lost online access immediately. Very inconsiderate!
Money automatically transferred from the CD to the Share account without any problems today. Going to pull the funds from Ally.
Did you find out if they still do a hard pull for opening a checking account if you already have share savings account?
No, they do not do a hard pull if you are already a member..
My 7% CD has matured, and I’m trying to cancel the CD. Does anybody know how to do it online? (I haven’t found any instructions.) Thanks!
I was going to click on the Message Center and send a message requesting that the CD be closed and the funds deposited into my Free Checking account. Then I can withdraw the money. Mine doesn’t come due until the 27th. @Deal Seeker
@arizonapv, Since you have a number of Orion accounts, are you actually meeting the requirements for the GLCU free checking account for the 3% or are you just keeping it active should another special like this one comes along?
If you aren’t using it to meet the requirements, how will you avoid the quarterly inactivity fee of $15 after a year of no activity (before this CD came about and now after it matures) or are you planning on closing the account? Do you deposit a small amount from another bank to meet the activity requirement?
Considering whether I should open the checking account to avoid the $5 a month fee for having just the savings account and not wanting to keep $500 in it. Do you know if they do a hard pull for their checking account even if you are already a member?
I don’t know about your other questions, but I keep accounts active by setting up recurring transfers to move $1 back and forth every few months.
If you do not do the direct deposit or debit card transactions, or pay a bill, then there is no monthly fee nor minimum balance. I am not doing the requirements. With no minimum bal requirement, it doesn’t hurt to keep the account open. As Ann says, the activity requirement would not be difficult. I do not know if they do a hard pull if you already have an account. https://www.glcu.org/bank/checking/free-checking/
True enough. I was just looking at their schedule of fees and noticed the $15 a quarter inactivity fee if there is no activity for a year so was just wondering how you were handling that (guess a $1 transfer would take care of that though).
Will see how GLCU responds to the hard pull question before I make a decision.
I sent them a message and they set it up to transfer automatically when mine matures next week. They also sent a letter confirming this. You can also call to give them instructions or use the web chat feature.
Don’t remember how long after the CD matures that they give you to advise what you want done with the money, but I would call or use web chat during the week if I were you to make sure it doesn’t role over into another CD (think they put it in a 1 year CD)
UPDATE: Just found the Truth-In-Savings info they sent and they give a grace period of 7 calendar days after the CD matures to withdraw the funds without penalty from whatever new term CD they put it into.
Thanks. I tried sending a message, but other than a supposed confirmation number, there is no indication that the message was sent, i.e., there’s no way to see a list of sent messages. If I don’t hear back within a couple days, I guess I’ll give them a call.
Yes, don’t like that about their messaging system (other banks and CU’s have that also) and with a lot of people probably sending in messages with instructions on their CD, might take a while for them to respond (I sent my instructions on June 1).
Have you tried their chat feature? I used it in the past and as I recall, it was pretty responsive.
I didn’t try the chat because they did end up responding to the message.
I just did a chat and the rep said he’d close it and transfer the funds to my GLCU checking. It was fast and easy.
Wanted to give my data points, since it was not a great experience. They took two weeks to open the account, even though I uploaded the driver’s license and utility bill within a day or two. Then, they gave a deadline of 12/7 3pm Central for the funds to be available, so I added them as an external account on two of my checking accounts. The checking account did the test transactions, and GLCU charged me overdraft fee of 29$ each for the two transactions because they could not process the credit and debit fast enough. So I called them to get that reversed, which the rep did, but sounded not very pleasant because they probably got a lot of people trying to get the 7% offer (don’t offer it publicly, if you don’t want the customers), and insisted that I had delayed in the funding somehow, even though I explained that they did not open the account fast enough.
I applied Thursday morning last week. Finally got an update today. They didn’t respond to my request for confirmation that the CD is still going to be available to me because of when I applied. Just a generic message saying to provide a utility bill and a ‘new account questionnaire’ (just a bunch of checkboxes about how you intend to use the account, with answers that aren’t well-designed to handle our situation). You have to either email or snail-mail these; they claim you could upload them to the application site, but that doesn’t work since they still only have it set up to allow uploading driver’s licenses from our end.
You can still upload them and identify them as driver’s license. Then I put in the comments what it really is. I was approved a few days later.
When I contacted them last week, they already set up the CD, so it was just a matter of telling them to transfer the money from my savings to the CD.
What storm said, just upload multiple “drivers licenses”. I didn’t even bother adding comments.
I asked three separate times for them to confirm my eligibility, they ignored the question every time and just cut-and-paste from their outdated script (incorrect directions on how to navigate the site).
I got online account access on Friday, but no funding, and the 7-7-7 account was listed as one of my accounts. Micro transactions came through Tuesday but the website wouldn’t let me verify online so I had to open a chat (real chat, not the secure messages in the pre-account process) and get them to approve manually. Funding came through today.
My advice: Once you get online account access, see if you have the 7-7-7 account listed. If yes, then you should be good to go once the funding completes (you’ll just miss a few days of interest). If it’s NOT listed, I would pull the eject lever and do whatever you planned to do with the account after the CD matured (i.e. close out the accounts or maintain minimum to avoid fees).
OK, thanks for the information. Where is the ‘real chat’, is it in the online banking? (I don’t have access to that yet, and haven’t been able to find any mention of it in the public site.)
Ah, yes, real chat is behind the you’re-not-a-real-customer-yet wall. 😉
Once you have online banking access it’s Services > Web Chat.
Thanks. I just got my approval this afternoon, now I have to wait for the microdeposits to verify. The approval message had an alarming note at the end about a deadline tomorrow afternoon, which won’t be enough time for all the ACH back-and-forth at this point, so I called them and was told that it was only really a deadline for approval, and it will be okay if it takes into next week to complete the funding.
I did get this CD successfully opened despite the funding taking a few days longer to finalize the stated deadline. Getting my online banking access set up later was a PITA though, for various reasons that hopefully most people won’t run into, and their support/communication was not so great in that process. Until you have online access successfully established so you can access the secure chat thing, the only way to communicate is by phone, with wait times that can exceed an hour, and a lack of follow-through on issues that the front-line call center people can’t resolve themselves.
Why are there hard pulls? Don’t banks want your money to make money?
Sometimes hard pulls are nice(haha). Not this one.
Hard pull? Yes.
Which credit bureau? Did you get a notification from the credit bureau or the bank? How many days after account opening was it pulled?
After going through some extra hoops, GLCU finally opened my share savings account today. The problem is that it is too late to link my existing account and transfer the funds over by tomorrow. I did a chat and the rep told me that they will still honor the CD deal next week since I opened my account before the 30th. Just an FYI.
Just what I needed to know, thanks!
@#%*… “Thank you for your application. Unfortunately, our system was unable to automatically qualify you. We will review your application and contact you via the online application message system within two to three business days.”
Got the same response on Monday AM, just *now* received the follow-up contact requesting identity and address verification. I’m not optimistic.
Too late for you to have tried this, but a tip that will hopefully turn out to be helpful for someone else: Instead of waiting for them to ask for it, I was able to preemptively upload my driver’s license by signing back into the application site after it dead-ended on that message.
Unfortunately they only have it set up with a category for driver’s license, there was no option to also upload a utility bill like I’ve been asked for at other banks/CUs, including at least one other that uses this exact same outsourced application system (I think that was Premier MCU) with more upload categories defined.
After uploading the DL, I sent them a message in the application site (is that the ‘chat’ other people were talking about? it’s not real-time) saying I had done so, and asking for confirmation that my right to the 7-7-7 CD had been locked in by applying when I did. No response all day Thursday.
Good news, gregk on DA said Thursday evening, “a GLCU rep told me today that as long as the application is completed by tomorrow (Nov.30), even if your membership isn’t approved and the CD established and funded until after that date the offer will still be good.”
This is definitely popular. My $5k opening transfer (pull) and $2k push from Discover Savings have finally posted and no holds outstanding. Called to open CD and got a message in the IVR to leave a “secure message”, i.e. voicemail, with account number and amount to open CD with (maybe another element was requested?). Message says they will process all requests within one business day and send a confirmation after completion. Planning to call back in (or chat) on Friday if I don’t see anything in my account.
I sent a SM and by the next day they opened the account.