COVID-19 changed the way banks and credit unions operated, shifting many branch services to online platforms. But the pandemic didn’t stop some from moving to brick-and-mortar expansions and, in one case, undertaking a major merger. The big news roiling the local banking scene was Columbus, Ohio-based...
Record December 2020 home sales in the Grand Traverse area tipped total sales figures over $1 billion, setting records for both number of homes sold in a single year (3,455 homes) and total single-year sales value ($1,220, 513,667). Factors like people relocating to northern Michigan and...
As a mortgage lender, my job is largely contingent upon the state of the real estate industry. So, when I had conversations with real estate agents about what 2020 might look like, I was concerned too. In the early days of the pandemic, Michigan’s real estate...
Early last spring, TBA Credit Union was averaging about $65,000 a month in deposits from unemployment benefits. Between April and August, that number jumped to $3 million a month as thousands of newly laid-off people deposited their jobless benefits. Overall, TBA deposits are up 20% as of...
Is all investment advice equal? Seems like an easy question to answer, right? We assume that someone who is providing financial advice knows what they’re talking about. The problem is that isn’t always the case. In fact, there is no educational requirement for those who...
Online banking has been growing for years, but local bankers say the coronavirus pandemic has turbocharged the trend. They’ve seen customers rapidly moving to a variety of digital banking applications, including online check depositing, electronic signatures for loan documents and digital wallets, which store credit and...
by Amy Lane Chocolate maker. Alpaca farm. Experiential bookstore. Winery. Preschool center. Kombucha company. Differing businesses, all challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic. And all helped by a local fund offering aid to the smallest of the small: Businesses with nine or fewer employees. Borne to help businesses that are...
[caption id="attachment_42426" align="alignright" width="439"] Dennis Prout, Shea Petaja and Heidi Thompson. Photo by Michael Poehlman Photography[/caption] Every week, Dennis Prout hops behind a microphone at WTCM in downtown Traverse City for New Retirement Radio, a one-hour program on NewsTalk 580 that’s made him a little bit...
Healthy Start Child Care has been providing much-needed day care for families in the Traverse City area for a quarter of a century. But the coronavirus epidemic, which prompted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to order the temporary closure of most day care operations, threatened to shut the...
Local business leaders have high hopes that an unconventional, little-known federal tax incentive could pump millions of dollars of new commercial and residential investment into a low-income section of Grand Traverse County. A 6.2 square-mile swath of land including a large area of Garfield Township and...
