Welcome to 2024! The start of the new year is a time of hope. It’s also a time to prepare your finances for challenging times. Our President & CEO, Laura Campbell, offers three resources that can help you thrive and overcome financial challenges throughout 2024.
The economy is fickle. There are peaks and declines. The stock market climbs one quarter and crashes the next. And when it comes to interest rates, over the past five years, we bet you thought they couldn’t get any lower and wondered if they’d ever go down.
The last quarter was filled with new developments at your Credit Union. The most exciting was the introduction of Tulee, our digital banking platform. Thank you to all our Members who downloaded and are using the Tulee app. We hope it will make banking with us even easier. And be on the lookout for new Tools and improvements by the end of the year and into the future. We appreciate the enhancement suggestions – keep them coming!
Excited as we are with Tulee, it’s just part of our long-term plan for members, and I’m glad to report that we’re well on track. Recently we had a banking econometrics expert review and analyze our performance over the last four years to help identify how we could improve compared to the rest of the credit union industry. A byproduct of this was a set of metrics that compared us to industry performance averages.
A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal went: “Mass Layoffs or Hiring Boom?” This curious title perfectly sums up the difficulty we are all facing: deciding where our economy is heading.
Like the seasons, our economy goes through cycles, but unfortunately these aren’t as predictable as “spring follows winter.” During an adverse cycle, like the high inflation we’re experiencing, we can’t eliminate the pain but can take measures to mitigate its impact. Cutting back on discretionary purchases, like a few less Starbucks, or keeping the old phone six months longer is a great start.
These days, as you might imagine, the Credit Union spends a lot of time trying to help our member-family address the immediate effects of inflation. Today I’d like to focus on this, and also touch on how we keep our eye on the longer-term: how we help members plan for a financially independent “happily ever after.” Also, a bit of news on a big initiative we’re working on for you.
I was thinking that on any given day, if many of you chose, you could spend the best part of your time online – reading, texting, checking posts, binging on the latest streaming recommendations, and doing Wordle of course.
If you want to buy a house in the next 12 months – you’ll need some hard work and a bit of luck. But you can improve your help your chances of success, and your wallet, with a plan.
