Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU)

I agree this discussion doesn’t belong in the NFCU thread. Maybe shinobi should be commenting on another thread, like an MS thread.

By the way, I am doing $5 million a year in MS but I can’t tell you what I’m doing.

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Congrats, Argyll. I always knew you were the man! I want to be like you. :smile:

I opened another NFCU Flagship Rewards account today. The previous one was opened December last year and I closed it in April after collecting $580 rewards on $4000 spend (14.5%).

I plan to do the same thing again. Ssshh!

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So the Flagship is churnable, huh? How did you close it–just a secure message? Were you able to recover any of the credit line, and transfer it to another card before closing?

I closed it by phone and transferred the entire credit line to two existing cards.

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NFCU continues CD rate leadership with certain certificates, 18 month and five year:

Details from CD discussion thread

ETA

Here is the new NFCU rate sheet. It became effective several hours ago:

New NFCU CD ratesheet

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The NFCU Cash Rewards is 1.5% and there’s no minimum to redeem. I wish they’d increase it to 2%. I’ve been using State Department FCU’s 2% card. I converted the Alliant 2.5% card (because I didn’t want to pay the higher fee) to the free 2% card but see no reason to use the Alliant card when there are so many other 2% alternatives. Wish I didn’t miss the boat on USAA’s Limitless.

I use the Alliant card because for me it works out to over 2% even with the fee, and 2.1% or 2.2% is better than 2%.

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Even with the fee increased to $99? You spend a lo more than I do. :smiley:

NFCU doesn’t allow ACH’s out of the shares savings account, so yeah, you would need a checking account to ACH out. I highly doubt they would limit to $5k on ACH pulls.

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When I open and add to NFCU CDs, I call and the the transfer is done to my NFCU savings account.

The funds are automatically transferred to the CD a few days later. I receive double interest for a few days.

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Please note: All times in this post refer to eastern time

I have two NFCU data points to report. I’ve been doing the NFCU five year CDs. I can report NFCU updates its CD rate sheet each night at, or just after, midnight. The rate sheet thereafter is good for the next 24 hours. Is it the same on weekends? I dunno.

The opening of NFCU certificates required me to be ACHing funds into my NFCU checking. As you know, it is straightforward to open NFCU CDs online from funds in checking.

When we went from July into August I was concerned they would drop the rate (they did not) so I was watching the NFCU website during the overnight. I noticed the darndest thing which is the second data point I want to report. I’ve not seen anything like this prior . . anywhere.

I had ACHed funds from two different places, Alliant and PurePoint, the last day of July. The Alliant funds were dispatched just after 1:00 PM, and the PurePoint funds left even later in the day. Both deposits were showing and available in my NFCU checking at 2:30 AM on August first. That is the earliest I ever have experienced ACHed funds, dispatched the prior day, arriving at their destination. Customarily such funds would not appear until between 5:00 AM and 8:00 AM, or whatever . . . sometimes even later than that.

NFCU is REALLY on the ball to be doing ACH account credits so early.

Caveat:

Course I really do not know exactly when NFCU credited those funds to my checking. All I know is that they were there at 2:30 AM. And there is no jeopardy in account credits anyway.

But clearly NFCU is running their ACH files hours before I would have anticipated, or at least they certainly were that night. That is fine for ACH deposits. But if you are hitting your NFCU checking with an ACH withdrawal, be on notice it could hit the account really early.

Q: Shin, are you suggesting an ACH withdrawal could hit a member’s NFCU account the same day it was initiated at an outside financial institution?!

Far be it from me to suggest any such thing. I am merely your humble reporter, here only to present a couple of data points as I experienced them.

But you be thoughtful and careful out there. NFCU is doing stuff I have not seen previously anywhere else.

UncaMikey. When a CD matures you must move the funds to either a checking or savings account at some institution. (I use Alliant CU) Then set up ACH transfers at NFCU (routing # etc.) Next ACH funds to checking, savings at NFCU. Then call rep & have funds moved into the CD. Really simple. :yum:

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I have not studied the above posts sufficiently to be certain. Sorry.

But I’m going to risk error here and propose UncaMikey might not understand the concept of having a hub account. It’s only a guess.

I think we all have hub accounts and just take that for granted. Pattyb53 mentioned Alliant. And she has also referred to having an account at PurePoint. I happen to use both of those service providers as hub accounts also.

I cannot imagine financial management without help from at least one hub account. I’m pretty sure I could not do it. I’d be contorted into a pretzel trying to move money around quickly and efficiently.

Ya gotta have a hub account which provides overnight ACH service. Anyone lacking that resource . . . well . . . that is problem #1.

I think you guys are not understanding the point about NFCU and ACH. When a CD matures at NFCU, or if you simply want to transfer money out of your share account to boost your checking account at another institution, you can’t do that. You must either maintain a checking account there, or engage a human being on the phone after going through phone menus and see if you can get an exception.

For me, I begrudgingly opened a checking account, and you can do internal transfers at NFCU instantaneously online. My gripe with it is having yet another account/account number/registry/statement to reconcile/etc. It’s not the end of the world, just unnecessarily complicated. Still for me, that’s better than having to make a phone call.

Two other annoying things about NFCU that I’m sure I’ve mentioned before … 1) You can’t automatically pay your credit card bill in full each month. I’ve got 25+ credit card accounts and NFCU is the only one that doesn’t allow this, and 2) they require multi-factor authentication every stinkin’ transaction download. It is a generally acceptable risk to use the fact that you have multi-factored with this device already in combination with username/password credentials, but not NFCU. I know Argyll will say this is more secure, and I won’t argue with that … it is. But security is a risk management problem, and NFCU are beyond the industry standards on this one.

All that said, I love NFCU and have no other issues with them. I use them quite a bit. The annoyances I mentioned are minor in comparison to egregious atrocities as one might find at, oh, Synchrony.

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Sorry. I never intended any disrespect. Let me say that my very FIRST experience with NFCU, as a brand spanking new member quite a few years ago, was a horribly failed attempt to ACH funds out of my savings account. I got my ears boxed. I had failed to read the account terms they sent me. Bad on me.

So I thereafter did the obvious: I opened an NFCU checking account. It was no bigee. They have free checking. I keep a dollar in the account when it is not in use. In all the years since, NFCU has never hassled me about my checking account.

Okay, so an NFCU CD matures and I want to withdraw the dough via ACH. I have two choices, both of which rely on the automatic movement of my funds, at maturity, into checking. This is an account feature at NFCU:

  1. I can initiate an ACH withdrawal at Alliant once I see the funds in NFCU checking. This costs me one day of interest on any day except Friday and works up to $100,000. Or, and usually better

  2. Once I see the matured CD funds in NFCU checking I can initiate an ACH pull at PurePoint. This works even on a Friday and it works up to a million bucks. There is no loss of interest whatsoever this way. I do not have any CD accounts anywhere near to a million $$$. If you do, why are you here instead of out sunning yourself at your palatial Caribbean island villa.:grinning:

Bottom line the NFCU checking account ACH thing is a non-event once you are aware of the restriction. The workarounds are easy peasy if you have the right hub accounts.

Now as for the notion of using Ally Bank as a hub . . . or anything else for that matter . . . I had better not get started on that insanity!!

Your descriptions of NFCU’s procedures were “difficult, quirky, puzzling,” For me, approaching things this way makes it hard to conduct business and I wanted to point out that people have successfully navigated this issue.

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Can’t we all get along?

The checking account workaround is manageable. I never keep a penny in it for more than a few seconds.

It is still quirky.

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This is exactly why I am so confused. People are talking about losing interest because of the CD>Checking>elsewhere hoops they must jump through. However, the reality is that you can transfer from the CD to checking instantly, and then elsewhere as if the money were going directly from the CD (timing wise). I don’t understand why this warrants so much grief. Sounds to me like people feel entitled to not have to do that, since their other accounts don’t have that same limitation. Why not just deal with it and move on with life? It’s literally 30 seconds extra, if that, compared to going CD>elsewhere.

Some of us will drive around to numerous malls or stores to buy $500 gift cards, just to net a few bucks per card, while spending a LOT of time and energy. Yet people have such a huge problem because they have to do a few more mouse clicks from their couch?

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No one is, or should be, freaking out to the extent you are implying with words like “so much grief” and “huge problem”. And it is more than a few mouse clicks. It’s another account to maintain, something else to reconcile, another hit on Chex, etc. And God forbid the checking account earn a penny of interest, then there would (legally) be a tax consequence! But as I said, these things are manageable if the benefits of having CDs there outweigh it, and I think they do.

In a thread that is dedicated to a discussion of dealing with a specific financial institution, there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that NFCU has a few practices that are different from most all other financial institutions a particular person (representing one data point) has seen.