Woodsville Guaranty Bank And Trust: We Will Probably Skip It

Woodsville Guaranty Bank Seems to Focus on Their Community More Than Creating Good Banking Products

The biggest selling point for community banks is how they work closely with their local communities to support businesses and help their neighbors.

However, most community banks never go beyond offering basic mortgage, banking, and loan services. They don’t engage with their communities and basically act like a regular bank on a smaller scale.

Woodsville Guaranty Bank is (thankfully) not like those community banks.

This community bank is located in Woodsville, New Hampshire (as you probably guessed), and offers plenty of additional services and support to build a trustworthy relationship with its community.

For example, they also organize a group travel program to help locals enjoy fun tours and day trips. Currently, 24% of community-dwelling elderly Americans are considered socially isolated.

With loneliness and isolation being some of the top concerns for the elderly and cost restrictions making it difficult for people to enjoy trips and travel, this kind of program is a huge advantage for a community to have open to them – and this gives Woodsville Guaranty Bank a huge boost in terms of reputation.

Because this bank has also been in the community for over 100 years, it’s become a staple part of the area. This makes it a trustworthy bank to handle your money as it has decades of experience and success to bank up its reputation.

Unfortunately, you can’t choose a bank on reputation alone. You also need to check their services, rates, and fees – so let’s move on!

They Offer Basic Products, But Their Rates Are Not Competitive, Especially On The Deposit Side

When it comes to what Woodsville Guaranty Bank has to offer, they offer basic banking services.

They have the usual products like:

• Checking and savings options for personal and business accounts
• CDs and IRA options for investing
• Mortgage loans

Like most banks there are also saving account options for teens and young children to help them learn more about handling money responsibly at a young age – so they cater to their customers’ needs across a wide range of ages.

If you are looking for a local bank with basic, classic services for your everyday needs, then you could consider Woodsville Guaranty Bank as it covers its basic services but it also has some additional options you may be interested in.

For example, it offers trust and investment services to help you plan for retirement and where your money goes after your death. There’s even advice and support for setting up long-term care insurance so no matter your age.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that these services are operated by an affiliate and supported by Woodsville Guaranty Bank – but it’s still great that they are making these services more available to people in the Woodsville area.

But, as noted in the headline, their rates are not good. You can easily get better deposit rates elsewhere. Their lending rates were “ok,” maybe a bit above average. Other products we checked, like credit cards, were pretty unimpressive as well. For example, their flagship credit card product offers 1 point per dollar of purchases. It’s hard to say what percentage those points are worth, but we’d guess it’s around 1%, which is easy to beat these days. 

We Have Serious Concerns About Their Technology

While they claim to have a mobile app, it does not appear to be available in the app store and there’s no other way to find and download it. This is a major miss in this day in age, since most banks have readily available mobile apps with strong customer satisfaction ratings. 

Additionally, their website and online banking system felt dated and in need of a refresh, this doesn’t give us great confidence. 

It Could Be Hard To Get Cash

With only ~12 branches in the greater Woodsville area and a few ATMs, if you ever need to get cash and you’re not in the immediate area, you could be out of luck. 

Most small banks easily solve this problem by being part of an ATM network, often with tens of thousands of ATM options across the country, but Woodsville Guaranty does not seem to have signed up for one of these networks yet. 

Customer Feedback Is Uncertain 

Typically, we like to get a feel for how much customers like their bank by surveying half a dozen or so reviews and ratings sites. Unfortunately, Woodsville Guaranty is so small, there are not reviews at all on most of these sites for them. They are also not BBB accredited, which is usually a small but easy thing to achieve. So, that feels like an easy miss and we wonder why they wouldn’t take the time to do such an easy thing to give consumers a little confidence in them. 

Lending Rates Are Opaque – Usually Not a Good Sign

Typically, banks offering strong, competitive rates like to advertise the facts loud and clear. Woodsville certainly mentions that they are willing to do many different types of loans from personal loans, to RV loans, to mortgages, and business loans.

But, they make you apply to find out the rate. This is frustrating, makes comparison shopping though, and is usually not a good sign that you’re going to get a great rate.