In article . com,
wrote:

But, the further things go along, the more power the bank,et al, has
over you to "up their estimates" I guess.

True. You start passing various points of no return, or perhaps I
should say points of 'difficult to return' along the way.

So what in general should buyers do?

You need to do your research. When buying our first house, our credit
union had fewer frivolous rip-off charges on the closing estimate, and a
good rate with no points, so we chose them. It's good to check out a
variety of lenders, but keep in mind two things:

1. estimates are a crock sometimes

2. everything on a closing statement is negotiable

So, be a tough negotiator. HUD has a document that lenders are required
to give you, that explain the various charges on the HUD-1...however,
lenders keep getting creative with where they tack on fluff and how they
call it. Even normal things may vary from lender to lender. Some
numbers, like taxes, you can check yourself to make sure they're not
putting on bogus numbers to make the total look nice and make you
overlook the b.s. fees. For insurance, you pick the company/rate. It
may be helpful, in fact, to ignore the #s they *can't* mess with so you
focus more on the ones they *can* -- i.e. ignore taxes (the lines for
tax money go directly to the state/county/jurisdiction) and insurance
(again, you pick your insurer), and look at the other stuff.

Sorry to ramble....

Kendall

--
Kendall P. Bullen http://www.his.com/~kendall/
kendall@---^^^^^^^

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