Family losing home because of seven-cent mistake:
A Michigan family is losing its home because it underpaid the mortgage by 7 cents in January, a legal aid group says.
The statement is presented as straight fact in the lead. However:
Rooks said [redacted] of Deckerville, in the Thumb, inadvertently underpaid their mortgage because a postal clerk issued a money order for $440 rather than $440.07. The couple didn’t catch the mistake and they were four weeks late making February’s payment of $690.07. She said they had been late before.
Though the Bergers caught up by mid-April, Rooks said, Countrywide Financial and its new owner, Bank of America, rejected the couple’s payments. Bank of America countered that it and earlier loan servicers bent over backward to accommodate [redacted], who has been repeatedly delinquent since purchasing the modest four-bedroom frame bungalow for $38,650 in 1997. It said [redacted] rejected a reasonable offer last week to get reinstated.
Those allegations by the people who know and who own the paper mean nothing; the paper and its wire service have their hook and story. It was the seven cents, and that illustrates how capricious and darewesay evil companies are. Only the benevolent government and its press corps can save the people.
