Congratulations!  You’re in the hunt for a home – which for most people is one of the first, and often the largest, long-term investments they will make in their financial future.  When the market is heating up, the pressure to make your decision and act quickly can get ahead of the prudent budgeting and planning necessary to make a rewarding decision.  We’d like to take you through the process you ought to be following before you decide to put pen to paper on your Purchase Agreement and eventually your first mortgage.

Whether you are one of the people that are taking actions to create financial stability or not, there is a habit that everyone can benefit from—paying yourself first.  It’s common for people to pay for their expenses (fixed, variable and living), and put into savings what’s leftover, which is paying yourself last.

You probably hear credit scores mentioned routinely in the news or on commercials, but have they ever been properly explained?  Most often, by the time you’ll understand what a credit score is, and why it should be important to you, you might have already made decisions that lower your score.  The focus of this post is to explain credit scores, how your decisions impact them, and why you should care about t

At the beginning of 2016 we decided to brand our Bank’s mission as “Investing in YOU.”  For decades we have been committed to giving consistently great customer service, or as former President and current Board of Director Bruce Pederson would always say “We do community banking, and we do it well.”  With services moving more and more to the online environment, while good for convenience, takes the focus away from the “community” part of community banking.  We feel empowered to re-communicate what community banking is—or should be.  We settled on three words, “Investing