Tuicu Reviews 2

Terrible experience. Staff contradict each other, insult you, and give zero real help. Interest piles up while you try to catch up. Honestly, I’d rather owe a loan shark than deal with them—you get a total mental battering. Avoid at all costs.

When this union was established in 1966 members such as me felt we were involved in an organisation that would be there to support us in time of need. I am afraid that the supportive vision of this outfit can no longer stand. While it suits these union loan arrangers to pay lip service to this idea of mutual support, the reality is now they see themselves as current account bankers where they showboat their growth and bottom line. Smug and busy with their on-line lending facilities for the purchase of cars and holidays, they appear to have become impersonal with little time now for the requirements of long-established members. These seem brushed aside in all this buzz of lending to young members for holidays and cars. The union appears from its slick advertising, desperate for their young members to take on debt to purchase cars and holidays, as interest from these loans is needed to pay the salaries of the eight loan officers. All pretence of mutuality is gone. Young people are told to just sign up for membership and that instantaneously they will be given all they ask for in loans. This is how the union achieves its ‘successful’ year-to-year growth. The loan officers will literally run down the street waving loans at this demographic. They effectively give young people automatic approval for life insurance to cover loans which they flag wave and virtue signal as a benefit. Of course they can risk offering life cover to this cohort because it is most unlikely that persons die young. Thus the union gets to brag about how wonderful it is, offering free life assurance, without ever really having to worry that a claim will be made. In fact, if you are a new member you will, it appears, be treated with far more respect and attention than older members who seem to be treated much harsher by this outfit. They put mature people through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops, delays and embarrassment. After you apply for a loan on-line, as an older person, they will then insist you fully propose yourself for life cover. Out from under the table comes a 4 page paper form. You will be compelled to give details on it, that are open to their loan officer to peruse, regarding heart disease, stroke, raised blood pressure, or diabetes; stomach, bowel, liver, pancreas, kidney disease; lung conditions, cancer, tumours, other growths; anxiety, depression, or stress; back pain, slipped disc, whiplash or back trouble; arthritis, MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers, or other neurological disease, alcohol problems, visual defects or a hearing problem, Hepatitis B or C, HIV/Aids, and the catch-all ‘other diseases or disorders, medical condition or injury’. Also details of tablets or medicines taken. You must agree to be examined by their doctor and permit the disclosure of your medical details to a list of third parties, and for your own GP to be contacted. Then there is the wait to find out whether they will or won’t give life cover, or if the cover is hedged with all sorts of exclusion that you have to swallow. The 4 pages of enquiry are very cunningly structured, so that they get to prize out your medical history from the day you were born. This 4 page form serves three purposes. It craftily funnels delicious premium income to the League of Credit Unions (ECCU) which is cosily the union’s only insurer. Secondly, it lets the union off the hook, through, for them, having to avoid any delay whatsoever in getting the loan amount back should a person die. That is the union’s only ‘vision’. It also allows the insurers to sniff around the proposal and provides them with the opportunity to decline cover for every medical condition declared in the 4 page form. So the ragged, hollowed out cover then offered, despite all the flag waving, is no good. The union insists on this probing of your intimate medical details before considering if they will give you a cent. You could be astute, creditworthy, and financially most secure but, no, the loan officer’s priority before a loan, small or big, is even considered, is one of making judgment on the state of your arthritis, ventricles, prostrate and hearing no less. Despite all the hype: ‘we will consider all the circumstances’ fluffy words, I have found them as an older member to be unhelpful, and indifferent with never a follow up to see if they can assist. If noticed at all, your loyalty seems dismissed, and you will feel treated like a nuisance. It must be an absolute nightmare for anyone trying to get a mortgage from these heavy-handed and over-bureaucratic, inflexible loan ‘officers’. Reiterating what I said at the beginning - it is a union that has lost its original and true purpose and now is, as grasping and shamelessly self-serving corporate-type financial outfit, as they come.