This article first appeared in TheOutline.com Sept 30th, 2019.
Belonging to a credit union can have its advantages; notably, its members sometimes get better deals on financial products than they’d find at a traditional bank, since members’ money doesn’t get siphoned off to pay dividends to investors or to pay corporate taxes. And yet, the number of nationally chartered credit unions in the United States is shrinking. According to data from the National Credit Union Administration, we lost about 900 credit unions from 2014 to 2018, and, as reported in the Credit Union Journal, only a few new credit unions form each year.
