I love a good road trip (especially one that involves a Cracker Barrel breakfast), and yesterday Brent and I left Dallas at the crack of dawn to attend a lunch meeting of the Austin Chapter of Credit Unions.

It was a particularly interesting meeting because Dick Ensweiler was the guest speaker, and his topic was the state of the credit union movement. If you’re not in the credit union industry, this would be the equivalent of Quincy Jones talking about the state of jazz production, and if you’re not into jazz it’s like your grandma talking about the state of warm apple pies.

He didn’t start off with talk of CURIA, GAC, or bank attacks; instead, he spent a good bit of time first discussing the negative savings rate. Particularly he said it’s imperative that credit union members be informed about the importance of planning for the future – and that it’s the responsibility of individual CUs to offer financial education programs.

I’m aware of some programs that CUs are offering for this, but I won’t try to guess how effective they are. For example, blogging-superstar Verity CU partners with BALANCE (owned by Consumer Credit Counseling of San Francisco) to offer their members free telephone and online financial counseling and education.

BALANCE is careful to point out the difference between themselves and the CCCS companies that gave credit counseling a bad name. NASA FCU’s BALANCE page offers a detailed description, including:

BALANCE counseling is outcome-oriented – focusing on the options to help you reach your financial goals. While a debt repayment plan may be an option, it is only recommended when appropriate (about 20% of the time), and is only one of several available choices for getting out of debt.

Because of a few bad eggs in their industry, I raise an eyebrow at anything that says CCCS. But if BALANCE is really doing what they say they’re doing, it sounds like a program worth checking out.