Though the Fed's own dot plot, which is a self-survey of sorts, points to a rate hike sometime this summer, Schenk said there's also a good chance nothing will happen in 2015. In part, that's because of the effects of deflation in the Eurozone and Greece's precarious situation. Slack in the domestic labor market and declining GDP growth in China also weaken the case to raise rates, he noted.

"There's a lot of people that are arguing that the Fed has painted themselves into a corner," said Andrew McGeorge, CFO of the $2.5 billion Service Credit Union in Portsmouth, N.H. "Even if the data don't support it, they might have to make a token rate increase this year, just because they'll lose their credibility if they don't."

"The thing that strikes me most about the change in interest rates is what it will mean to credit union earnings," said Lake Oswego, Ore.-based economist and business consultant Bill Conerly, who thinks June might be go-time for a Fed rate hike. That's largely because if CUNA's projected loan growth of 11% in 2015 is right, rising rates could trigger considerable margin expansion.

"The interest rate on Treasuries, Fed Funds, what have you, will go up about one percentage point, and in that time period I think banks and credit unions will only increase the interest they pay their depositors by perhaps 5 or 10 hundredths of a percent," Conerly said. "That means that there's just going to be a large amount of earnings growth, simply because their loans will be paying higher interest, but their deposits will not cost them any more."

"If rates generally go up 2%, broadly speaking," McGeorge added, "what we earn on investments and what we earn on loans is also going to go up 2%, but what we pay for funds, what we pay on shares doesn't go up by that amount, generally, so that mismatch helps us when rates are higher. We also make more money when the yield curve is steep."

Read more about rising rates and credit union financial strategy in the Feb. 18 issue of Credit Union Times.