Alliant Credit Union

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Alliant may be great if you have tons of idle cash, but if you're paycheck-to-paycheck like me, then beware some of the following about Alliant before it's too late:

-If you overdraw their check card, then for six months they hold all your check AND CASH deposits for a few days each, to make it harder for you to catch up, so they can rake in more fees for bounced checks and missed payments. And those fees are not cheap.

-If you are late on a car payment, they cut you off from making online payments, so you have to manually call in your payment when they're there. That's right, they go out of their way to make it harder for you to make payments when you most need to catch up. This apparently is some amusement for them: to punish members.

-Alliant engages in a most despicable, apparently-still-legal yet highly unethical, lending practice of "universal default." This means they will use any bad credit item you may have anywhere as an excuse to instantly max your Alliant credit cards to the penalty rate -- even if your supposed "bad activity" has absolutely nothing to do with with Alliant. Late on your store charge? Poof, your 6% Visa is now a 29% Visa. Their goal here is simply to take the least-affluent "members" for all they can get.

-Some credit unions staunchly labor to improve and protect the credit health of their members by not reporting 30- and 60- day late payments, but rather waiting until a member is 90 days late to report. Alliant has no such cares and immediately reports all 30-, 60-, and 90-day late payments for no apparent reason.

These policies are not advertised anywhere. No one will call to warn you they're about to be inflicted. Two customer "service" reps acknowledged all of the above, but were unable to tell me where any of these policies were in print. They had to have their legal department return my call two weeks later. They couldn't find it, either (but were sure this all probably in one of the amendments to the account agreement). Ask LOTS and LOTS of questions about hidden policies before joining Alliant.

If you're wealthy, then I understand you can make good interest with Alliant, so maybe you don't care so much about policies that go out of their way to hurt the working-class members. My experience is from the perspective of someone with bills and credit card debt.