Should you ditch your bank?

By Liz Pulliam Weston

The bank bailouts made you sick. The fat bonus checks bankers paid themselves made matters worse. You despair over lawmakers who can't seem to do anything about too-big-to-fail banks but cash their campaign contribution checks.

You may think you can't do anything about any of this, but some people think you can.

They're urging Americans to move their money out of the Big Six banks -- Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo -- and instead use community banks or credit unions.

The movement is the brainchild of media maven Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post, who said she and some friends cooked it up during a pre-Christmas dinner party.

"We were talking about what had happened in the last year, how the banks are doing so well now but how small businesses are still starving for credit and job creation isn't happening," Huffington said. "The president seems so impotent, and Congress is powerless (to act against the banks)."

But individuals could act, the partygoers decided. They could vote with their money by moving it away from the big banks to community banks and credit unions, which largely had steered clear of the risky behavior that brought on the financial crash and the bailouts.

Why is one bank better than another?

Huffington didn't have to move her money; it was already with the small bank that had funded the startup of Huff Post. But she thinks she's struck a chord with people from all over the political spectrum who were aching to take action, and she marvels at the comments they've been leaving at the Move Your Money Web site created for the cause.

"There's a sense of empowerment," Huffington said. "People are saying: 'I was so frustrated, so angry, so depressed. This gave me something that I could do.'"

The Move Your Money campaign believes you should consider community banks and credit unions because:

• They're locally owned and operated (member-owned, in the case of credit unions), investing money in your community.

• Their deposits are insured, just like at big banks.

• Virtually all offer online banking, and many have big networks of fee-free ATMs.

They're not perfect, of course. Community banks are for-profit institutions, run for the benefit of their shareholders, not you. Credit unions are member-owned, but they may not have all the services and conveniences you'd get at a larger bank --although many belong to a huge network of fee-free ATMs that beats anything the big banks have to offer.

Furthermore, community banks and credit unions were early adopters of "bounce protection," the now-notorious and soon-to-be-restricted policy of approving over-limit transactions and then slamming customers with $35-per-incident fees.

Also, they're pretty weird bedfellows. Community bankers typically hate credit unions because the not-for-profit credit unions don't pay the taxes that the community banks must.

Continued: Will bankers even notice?

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• The return of the personal loan

• Compare bank rates on auto loans

• 10 things your bank won't tell you

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