"They are covered and do not really care about your coverage. That is why owners title insurance is always optional, while the lenders policy is required." - brickeyee Perhaps, but in this case the title company services only credit unions in the local area. In fact, they are a wholly owned subsidiary of our own credit union, which is handling the loan. Credit unions are supposed to exist for the benefit of their members. All the folks on the other side of the table at closing (CU loan officer, CU construction mortgage official, and title company official) seemed genuinely surprised when I questioned declining owners title insurance. They flat out stated that none of their construction loan customers ask for or get owner's title insurance, which is why I posted here. Bear in mind that this closing covered both loans. The construction loan automatically converts to a fixed rate conventional loan on completion of the house. There is no second closing where title insurance would come up in the future. The CU in question has a very active construction loan program with dedicated officials overseeing it. It isn't a small or part time operation. They run a full business credit/risk analysis on the contractor, and they send specialists out to inspect the build on a regular basis and prior to any payout. I'll be calling the title company next week for further discussions.

happy2bme: I honestly can't think of any scenario in which a $350 notary fee would be reasonable for a single sale! What does it take, like an hour or maybe two of mostly waiting around? Take a look at the link below to see the notary requirements for FL. The coursework is 3-hours and is offered free online! The notary application is only $39 and the other requirement is that you have to be 18 years old. So where are they getting those fees from? I don't know how much $350 matters to you, but maybe you should ask why you're getting charged that much. rrah: Yes, the fees are small in relation to the total price of the house. But it makes me feel worse when I have significant cash outlays EVERYWHERE else, too. Inspections, lender fees, realtor fees...all stuff that I'm never going to get back. I guess I mostly have a problem with the escrow companies not being very up-front with their charges. By the way - the fees I listed were for me as a buyer. The seller also got charged a wire fee (probably to pay off her lender), and my wiring the money into the title company's escrow shouldn't create a charge because I am separately paying my bank to do the wire. Like I said, I chickened out and didn't question it....that's my own fault. I think the escrow companies count on people not making a fuss. Especially because they are doing that nickel-and-dime thing where each charge is not that substantial in itself. I'm not saying all their charges are bogus, because of course the county does actually charge for recording and courier costs need to be paid to Fed-Ex/UPS. But I can bet you that, at least in my case, they have loaded some profit margin into both the recording and courier fees. I vote that escrow fees should be the only compensation for their services - any other charges should be strictly third-party charges with no padding. They could modify their escrow fee as needed if they somehow (I doubt it) haven't built enough profit margin into the current fees. I don't know how it works in all the other states, but in CO and CA, the title companies are the escrow providers, so keep in mind that they are already making a lot of money off the insurance premiums. I suspect that they would still do just fine if they provided escrow services free of charge with the purchase of title insurance. Nobody has said what they think about the title insurance premiums. Anyone know where the heck the money is going?

Eureka!! I found the information! From an obit. in the Washington Post June 4, 2011 "Harry Bernstein, memoirist who wrote of childhood of deprivation, dies at 101 Harry Bernstein, who caused a literary sensation when he emerged from anonymity in his 90s to write two devastating memoirs that explored his childhood of squalor, abuse and anti-Semitism, died June 3 at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 101. The cause of death was not reported. "The Invisible Wall" drew favorable comparisons to Frank McCourt�s Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angela�s Ashes," about that author's hardscrabble upbringing in Ireland. Reviewing "The Invisible Wall" in the New York Times, William Grimes called it "a world of pain and prejudice, evoked in spare, restrained prose that brilliantly illuminates a time, a place and a family struggling valiantly to beat impossible odds." In "The Dream," Mr. Bernstein's follow-up memoir, he traced his family's move to Chicago in 1922. In reviews, critics described Mr. Bernstein as a storyteller of quiet, heartbreaking power. Author Juliet Wittman, writing in The Washington Post, said of "The Dream" that "beneath the poignant descriptions of places and times past, beneath the rising and falling patterns of these characters' lives, we hear at Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity." For much of his life, Mr. Bernstein's writing career was steady but unremarkable. He critiqued and summarized manuscripts for film studios in the 1930s and 1940s once giving thumbs down to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as "just another historical romance." Later, he edited trade magazines and continued to publish articles and short stories. In 1981, he wrote a novel, "The Smile," about a fashion model. It received little attention, although he joked that he knew it sold at least one copy because of a letter he received from a reader. When his memoirs were published, Mr. Bernstein faced some skepticism from critics who said he could not possibly recall entire conversations from his childhood. He insisted he did, as they had been seared into his brain with photographic clarity. As much as he tried to forget the past, Mr. Bernstein did not extinguish the burning hatred he said that he felt for his father, who made his mother's harsh life even worse. She died at 65 of malnutrition in an unheated tenement in the Bronx, N.Y. After her funeral, he never saw his father again. "He wept when she died. That's the only good thing I can say about him," Mr. Bernstein told USA Today. He dedicated "The Invisible Wall" to his mother, "who gave us so much and received so little. Can this book make up for it? Can anything?" � The Washington Post Company

Evenshade, Chrome and Opera have extensions that allow you to change the background colour and the type colour. Chrome is Changing Colors and Opera is Theme-Up extension. Firefox has NoSquint add-on to do the same thing. I have my pages green with black printing and the read posts turn red. So much easier on the eyes! Here's a sample