Anyone ever attend a Credit Union "loan evening"?

I am getting bombarded with facebook ads for this, a Zoom online loan evening with my local CU.


I seen these advertised before, as actual loan evenings, where you wander down to the CU in person. Has anyone ever been to one?

Surely loans are fairly transparent and there's not a lot to ask or find out? You get some money, agree a time period and interest rate, and you pay it back?


Has anyone here attended one, or got anything to say about them? I've always been genuinely curious, but never brave enough to go down to them.

Jim2007

Deleted User wrote: »

Surely loans are fairly transparent and there's not a lot to ask or find out? You get some money, agree a time period and interest rate, and you pay it back?
.

Sadly that is not the case. We do a bad job in educating people about managing their financial affairs and as a result knowledge is hit and miss, not uniform.

I can’t comment specifically on the CU evening, but I have sat in on similar types of information evening in the past. The feedback has been completely boring from the financially savvy to a complete eye opener for people that never took out a loan before.

coylemj

Deleted User wrote: »

I am getting bombarded with facebook ads for this, a Zoom online loan evening with my local CU.

You have the option to unfollow the CU. I keep seeing my CU promoting their monthly car draw on FB and I just ignore the ads.

CUs are desperate for people to borrow money. Low interest rates should make borrowing attractive but the problem is that there's billions of euros in deposit accounts and banks and CUs are currently drowning in cash.

Spocker

Jim2007 wrote: »

people that never took out a loan before.

This is the target audience for evenings like this, and part of the Credit Union ethos is financial education, and if you take a loan from them after the evenings talk, even better

coylemj

coylemj wrote: »

You have the option to unfollow the CU. I keep seeing my CU promoting their monthly car draw on FB and I just ignore the ads.

CUs are desperate for people to borrow money. Low interest rates should make borrowing attractive but the problem is that there's billions of euros in deposit accounts and banks and CUs are currently drowning in cash.

For clarity, I've no issue with these ads. I much prefer them to the usual "win-a-house" competitions or raffles for cars that tend to target me because I use daft and donedeal.


Ironically, in relation to your second point, the interest rates in my CU are generally not lower at all, than traditional lenders.

garrettod

[Deleted User] wrote: »

.. I. ronically, in relation to your second point, the interest rates in my CU are generally not lower at all, than traditional lenders.

Why not go to the loan evening, and raise that very point?

Some of the smaller credit unions don't seem to have managed to move away from the old standard rate of 12.68% pa. Unfortunitely, no one seems to have sat them down and explained that their loans need to be competitively priced, if they want to attract in more borrowers.

I remember having this debate a few years ago, with some of the Board of my old CU. They argued that they needed the higher rate, to generate more income, to cover their costs. Unfortunitely, it took them a while to realise that higher rates discouraged applications from borrowers who could get loans elsewhere - so they were really only charging a higher rate loan to higher risk borrowers (unable to get a cheaper bank loan), and by extension, the risk of the CU losing money then increased.

Ultimately, the CU movement will succeed or fail, based on support from their members. That will only be forthcoming if the service is good (which it typically is), and their rates are good.

Well the loan evening was this evening on Zoom. I attended online and it lasted about 45 minutes, so wasn't too bad.

The majority of it was just kind of spent reading out the loan booklets that you can get in the CU or read online yourself. I asked 4 questions and 2 were answered, albeit they did say any questions that were asked, that weren't answered, would be answered and available to view/download as a word document the next day, so that seems fair enough.

Ultimately, i didn't benefit from it, and seen as almost everything they mentioned is already information that's readily available, I do struggle to fully grasp the concept, but they said about 130 members were logged on, so it must be useful to a lot of people.