I have been with Golden 1 Credit Union since before college. Now that it's about 20 years later, I still love them. They don't carry many of the fees as other banks and they have always been reliable and honest. Find one that works with you and your community. They usually have excellent abilities to work with you on accessing low interest loans, etc.

I first started banking with a CU, but then found that they could be just as unreasonable as a bank (late 90s.) I spent about a decade with BofA and received both good service and bad. Now I'm back with a CU and I'm seriously considering closing my BofA account on Nov 5. Right now I have a small portion of each paycheck deposited in BofA that I use for cash withdrawls so I can utilize their ATM network. However, with the cross-CU ATM network and 7-11 free ATM network (most CU are part of this) they're pretty much as omnipresent as BofA is so that's not as big a deal as I thought it would be. I get better rates, better service and the online tools are almost as good as BofA (no account-to-account transfer, and probably missing some other features I don't know of.) I don't blame BofA and other financial institutions for being "evil"...after all, they are for-profit corporations...it is their very nature to screw everyone over and make money at all costs. But why should I support them? CU provide all the same services, but it's NOT their mission to make profits...so, their practices are less dis-satisfactory to me as a consumer. Personally, I'm glad I've made the switch.