other Contractor failures to complete/ warranty issues

The old way of doing business was a third up front a third halfway through and the final third on completion. This is flawed from day one. A reasonable deposit should be expected; after all mobilization and prep work for the job take time and cost money. If your project requires a significant amount of special order items your contractor will have to pay his supplier upfront or at the very least those items are billed to his or her account. 

Who determines halfway and how would you know what halfway is ? The old line of thinking was that when you ran out of the first third that was halfway. But is it? Most contractors/ builders try their best to budget the project. Sometimes unforeseen expenses, sickness, weather effect that budget. Sometimes their just unscrupulous. Either way you've paid for 2 thirds of the job and its not halfway done. 

This is where it gets real sticky. If the unforeseen conditions snowball; which they inevitably do, there's not enough money to finish the project. We've seen it time and time again. The best of intentions don't pan out and you're left making smaller payments to coax them into finishing. At which point in time they've started another project to get the money to finish yours so they can get paid in full from you. 

We set up our contracts with 10% down. That covers our time estimating, meeting with you and our subs, ordering materials with a small retainer in the event the project doesn't proceed

We bill on a weekly basis for work completed and materials used  or ordered specifically for this project.

If at any time you are unsatisfied with progress or the quality of workmanship we first, do our best to rectify the situation and then, if the differences cant be resolved we go our separate ways. Our losses are minimal as are yours. We've been using this formula for years and the only clients that didn't like it were the ones who had no intention of paying in full in the first place.