NAFCU Services Blog

Three years ago NAFCU Services decided to offer a solution to credit unions that would a.) help their members manage their personal finance goals; b.) help credit unions engage members and provide value; c.) reinforce the value proposition of credit unions; and d.) attract prospective credit union members to our credit union locator site, CULookup.com, to learn about credit unions and find one they can join. That solution is financial calculators for both credit union websites and for CULookup.com.

I’m happy to say the financial calculators we developed on CULookup.com have been successful on all four counts – but perhaps one of the most important benefits the calculators can have is their influence on member saving. With America Saves Week just around the corner (Feb. 19-26), I took a look at my own personal savings goals in the past year and how important setting and achieving those goals has been – and you can see how online calculators have helped every step of the way.

1. Marriage – In October I got married, and as many brides do, I dove right into the planning and research after our engagement. One of the first things that all the wedding and marriage blogs, articles and checklists advise is to talk to your future husband about finances. Did you know the number one reason for marriage failure is finances? Wow, that was enough to get the ball rolling for me. My husband and I watched our spending, we prioritized our wish list and we decided to open a joint account where we would begin to automatically transfer money in order to save for our new life together – from planning our first home purchase to discussing our retirement savings plan.
2. First time home buying – After the wedding, the honeymoon, the thank you notes and all those other fun bride things, then came a big (and exciting!) decision for my husband and I – we decided to look into buying a house. Drawing from the lessons of the going ons in our housing market, I knew the first step had to be figuring out how much home we could afford before diving into a mortgage we’d struggle to pay each month. So after some quick and easy calculating online, we decided to go ahead and see what was out there in the price range we were comfortable with. As members of Navy Federal Credit Union, and fully aware that credit unions have the best loan rates and service :-), that’s the first place we went, to www.navyfederal.org to be exact. The mortgage calculators on their site gave us the final boost we needed to move forward (very helpful calculators specifically designed for their loan products, by the way). After our preliminary online research, we went to our local branch and began the process for a home loan. Long story short, after a few short weeks, my husband and I moved into our first home. :-)
3. Filling our new house – Having never bought new matching furniture before, it was very exciting to finally buy furniture to fit our new home. Again, my husband and I were faced with a situation where we need to calculate how to save for new furniture and other first time home owner purchases. Where did we start? Online again – we researched what we wanted and used an online “How Can I Save For a Big Ticket Item?” calculator (from a little website I happen to manage) to calculate what we could do to save for what we wanted.

Without telling my whole life story, the point I’m trying to make is that those online tools are so important! Whether they’re CULookup.com financial calculators or any others – your members need that help and influence to plan and save as they move through their life stages (not to mention that that’s how you build lasting relationships and value). In-person help is certainly important too, but let’s face it, these days the very first place people go for any information is the Web. Your members are finding these calculators online – shouldn’t they be seeing them on your website? Make sure you have the tools they need online first!

My savings goals now? I know life will have many more changes down the road – kids, their college, new cars, home expenses, retirement, travel, etc. And to help my husband and I plan, and more importantly achieve, our financial goals, we will continue to use free online financial calculators.

I’m willing to bet a good number of your members have experienced some of the same things in their lives as I have. Give them the tools they need and want in order to manage and achieve their personal finance goals. And what better time to do it than for America Saves Week?!

Here’s how you get started:

1. Put CULookup.com (or any) financial calculators on your website.
2. Check out the tools and resources on the America Saves Week website.
3. Make sure your members know you have those tools available online for them. Maybe an America Saves Week marketing campaign to drive traffic to the calculators. (Make sure they link to your related products by the calculators too!)

Don’t stop there -- continue to use the calculators beyond America Saves Week…

4. Track the calculators’ usage to figure out what your members are interested in.
5. Make sure you have solutions and promotions for the categories of the most popular calculators used – auto, home, retirement, credit , savings, whatever it may be at any given time.
6. Continually promote savings. Saving for a home, retirement, college, a big purchase, whatever it may be, your credit union should be the first place your members can turn for guidance.

What are you doing to promote America Saves Week (and savings any time) to your members? Do you have the online tools to help them?

Post written by Kirstin Orr, Senior Associate Director of Marketing, NAFCU Services Corp.

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Related posts and resources:

• Online financial calculators: Not just another website widget
• CULookup.com Financial Calculators