From Homeownership to Investing: A New Way for Members to Build Wealth
Blog by Samira Rajan November 05,2025
Hello members! I hope by now you all have seen our announcements about Brooklyn Coop’s new Investment app. You can now place funds, starting with as little as $10, into securities traded in the US stock market. The interface is clean and simple, seamlessly integrated into our online and mobile banking. Business accounts, minors and joint holders cannot participate, but all other members ought to be able to see a new tile called ‘Investments’ in the Bk Coop mobile app. The app will ask you a series of questions regarding your risk appetite and what types of industries you might prefer to invest into. You can transfer to your investment portfolio from your Brooklyn Coop accounts or from accounts you may have at other brokerages, and you can monitor your portfolio from the mobile app. The credit union will not charge any fees; the investment platform will charge a flat 0.30% fee.
Members have been asking for an investment option at the credit union for a long time but I had reservations. I thought there was too much volatility in markets for an investment portfolio to be a reliable source of wealth of people. Stock market portfolios could diversify wealth, but for ordinary people, the most reliable way to achieve economic security was to buy a home.
As recently as 20 years ago, that was true. There were a lot of steps involved – saving for a down payment, building a strong credit history, figuring out the difference between adjustable and fixed – but people were motivated. Brooklyn Coop became a HUD-certified housing counseling agency so we could help. The City of New York used to give out $10,000 down payment grants, which seems crazy to think about now, and we could help you qualify. Hundreds of people came to our individual mortgage counseling and First time Homebuyer Workshops.
The foreclosure crisis in 2007-08 broke all that apart. Thousands of people in our communities lost their homes despite 20 or 30 years of homeownership. Banks scrapped their First time Homebuyer benefits even as home prices kept rising. These days homeownership has gone from the American Dream to an impossible dream.
I also worried about all the noise around investing: shady podcasts, Reels, TikToks, influencers – all trying to attract customers to investing. Many of them treat investing into the stock market as if it is gambling, promising that luck and timing can result in a huge payday. That’s not a strategy. From one day to another, there are many people who can pick a winning team or a winning stock. But year by year, decade by decade, trying to pick winners will not result in a healthy securities portfolio. As such I was mistrustful of investing platforms that promised get-rich-quick and publicized meme stocks.
Instead, to build wealth over the long term, your best bet is a steady habit of investing $10 or $20 a week into your portfolio. Our partnership with Eko (the company behind the investment platform) is the right one from this perspective. When you start on the platform, they ask about your risk appetite and your age in order to build to a portfolio with an appropriate level of risk for you. There is an auto-transfer feature, but for now there is no option to pick individual stocks. Instead the idea is to choose a balanced portfolio that follows the trend of the stock market overall. (Check out these articles about investing strategies: How to invest in index funds or Investing Strategies).
For members who want to start investing in the stock market as a long-term strategy to build wealth, it is worth trying our Investments platform. As always, I look forward to any feedback you might have.