7-cent mistake costs a lot more : Late payers now losing their home

The Detroit Free Press reports:

A Michigan family is losing its home because it underpaid the mortgage by 7 cents in January, a legal aid group says.

"The bank seems more interested in having another empty house in Michigan than working with the family," Sydney Rooks, a lawyer for Legal Services of Eastern Michigan, said last week.

Rooks said Creg and Bonnie Berger 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 Bonnie Berger, who has been repeatedly delinquent since purchasing the modest four-bedroom frame bungalow for $38,650 in 1997. It said Berger rejected a reasonable offer last week to get reinstated.