One really nice thing about banking locally (no, REALLY locally) is the VERY personal service. Fraud alert call on a debit card? (Happened today.) Couple of minutes on the phone, fraudulent charges handled and card redlined. That’s pretty normal. In person: immediate service, two signatures. Now, fraudulent charges not only handled but new card and all, in almost no time. It really does help to know and be known face to face (and it doesn’t hurt to have the head teller as a next door neighbor :-)).
We deliberately took a percent and three quarters hit on our mortgage a couple of decades ago, because it meant going with our local bank. Got cookies and such from folks there when we paid it off early. Yeh, yeh, not a big deal, but it was a nice personal touch, and over the short time we carried a loan with the folks there, we had many times to be glad we had a direct line to the folks who “owned” our home with us.
Followup: had a couple of “auto-charges” from Amazon try to go through between the time my debit card was redlined and a new one issued. No problem. My folks here just took care of manually putting the charges through for me snip-snap! Good people.
Local is definitely the way to go. We have a local credit union and I could not have been more pleased over the years.
Indeed, Nicole, nothing beats going the “personal” route. We never regretted the few additional bucks on the loan. Besides, we saved a bit by paying it off early.