Loading blog content, please wait...
By Nashville Indiana Title Company
Three Numbers on Your Escrow Statement Worth Reading Twice Your escrow statement isn't hard to read. It's just long. By the time you sit down at the tab...
Your escrow statement isn't hard to read. It's just long. By the time you sit down at the table on the square, most of the numbers on that page are already settled, and you're mostly signing.
But a few figures are worth slowing down on, because they're the ones people ask us about after they get home and reread everything at the kitchen counter.
Here are the three that come up most, and what each one is actually telling you.
Somewhere near the top of your side of the statement, you'll see your earnest money listed as a credit. This is the deposit you put down when your offer was accepted, the money that's been sitting in a separate escrow account this whole time.
Read it twice for one simple reason: it should match what you actually sent, to the dollar. If you wired $3,000 as earnest money on a wooded lot near Bean Blossom, this line should say $3,000, and it should reduce what you owe at closing.
People sometimes forget they already paid it, then get a small jolt seeing the total they owe. That earnest money credit is why the number at the bottom is lower than the sale price. It was never extra.
It was always your money, held in trust and applied here.
This is the big one, the number you'll wire or bring a certified check for, and it's the line that deserves the most attention before closing day, not on it.
Cash to close is your down payment plus your closing costs, minus your earnest money credit and any credits the seller agreed to. It's every moving part of the deal netted down to a single figure you need to have ready. When we send you the final number, that's the amount to fund, no rounding, no guessing.
The reason to read it twice is timing, not accuracy. If that figure is bigger than you expected, you want to know while there's still room to move money between accounts. We covered wire timing in another post, but the short of it is this... a wire started at 3pm on a Friday may not land the same day, and your cash to close needs to be sitting in the escrow account before we can record your deed with the Brown County Recorder.
So look at this number the moment you get your statement. Not the morning of.
This is the line that confuses more Brown County buyers than any other, and it's worth understanding rather than just accepting.
Indiana pays property taxes in arrears, which means the bill that comes due covers a period that has already passed. So at closing, the seller owes their share of taxes for the days they owned the property, even though the actual bill won't arrive for months. That share shows up on your statement as a proration.
Depending on the calendar, this can land as a credit to you or a charge, and the dollar amount can look larger than people expect on a property with acreage. If you're buying a cabin with several wooded acres near the state park, the tax picture isn't the same as a small cottage in town, and the proration reflects that.
The number itself is calculated from the county's figures and the closing date. Read it twice so you understand why it's there, because six months from now when you're setting up your own escrow with your lender or budgeting for that first real tax bill, this line is the preview.
The rest of the statement matters too, recording fees, the title insurance premium, the loan charges if you're financing. But those are mostly fixed, quoted ahead of time, and hard to be surprised by.
These three move. Earnest money confirms what's already yours, cash to close tells you exactly what to fund and by when, and the tax proration explains a Brown County quirk that catches out-of-town buyers coming from Indianapolis or Cincinnati who are used to paying taxes a different way.
When we prepare a closing statement at Nashville Indiana Title Company, we go through these lines with you before you're sitting at the table signing. That's the point of getting your statement in advance. You've got time to read it twice at home, call us with a question, and walk in knowing every number instead of meeting them cold.
If any of the three don't look right to you, say so. We would much rather explain a proration or double-check an earnest money figure a few days early than have you wondering about it while you're holding the pen.