News

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Southeast. YouTube was launched. iPhone wasn’t a thing yet. Facebook celebrated its first birthday. Instagram was five years from starting up. And Bruning Bank launched its Broken Bow location. Yes, we are celebrating 20 years in 2025!

The weather is warming up! Kids are thinking about spring break trips and families are gearing up for summer vacations. It’s all fun and games until something happens with your bank account or debit card. We all know we can check our account balances on the app, but there are many more features we provide to keep your funds safe.

As I write this our bank is deep in the heart of renewing operating notes for the 2025 growing season. This has been one of the more trying renewal seasons we have had in several years. With crop prices down and inputs remaining high, this scenario has not been kind on our producer’s balance sheets, adding downward pressure on working capital and equity.

Just before the New Year, I lost my last grandmother, Ione Schelbitzki. She was my mother’s mother and achieved 104 wonderful years on this earth. Growing up, I always had grandmas and great grandmas on both sides of the family. I have been very blessed growing up with these wonderful ladies who all took their turns looking after all the grandchildren and teaching us valuable lessons.

Just about every day the front-line staff are faced with phone calls, face-to-face interactions, and emails from customers on whether something is legitimate or fraudulent. Fraudsters are ruthless and are attacking from all angles. Can we trust the mail? Can we trust a phone call? The answer isn’t very clear.

My name is Adam. “Madam I’m Adam,” say that spelled backwards. But most of my life I have been Fred’s son or Frank’s grandson. My wife works for a nonprofit, so I am always volunteered to help with her job. When this happens, I am Carley’s husband. After having children, I am referred to as the twin’s dad or <insert child’s name here> dad.

I love this time of year for many reasons: the birth of Jesus, family time, traditional meals passed down from past generations, and yes, the now over saturated football bowl schedule.

As we all know, this can be a time of stress because of all the things we think need to be done to make the holidays perfect. It is easy to lose focus on what is important this time of year.

Toy catalogs, Christmas Cards, Christmas program invites, and, of course, Amazon packages. These are just a few of the reasons I love checking my mail during the Holiday Season! This year, my mail has contained some not so merry news, letters describing data breaches and incidents of potentially compromised information.

Health Savings Accounts (HSA’s) are a good way for self-employed individuals to save for medical expenses with possible tax advantages*.  Bruning Bank offers HSAs to anyone who qualifies from being covered by a high deductible health plan.

I want to share my thoughts on technology and cybersecurity, you may initially think that using these words in the same sentence is an oxymoron (Webster defines as a combination of contradictory or incongruous words). I’ve learned that these two words do belong together and want you to encourage you to come to that same conclusion.