Faces of foreclosure

She is now on disability and hasn't been able to find full-time work for months. She said she briefly worked part time, but her condition forced her to quit.

She also tried to sell her house. Some people, whom she had never met before, knocked on her door to ask about her house because, she said, they knew she was behind on her payments.

"They told me, 'Don't pay your house payment, because we're going to buy your house and rent it back to you,'" she said. They told her that eventually she would be able to repurchase the house.

She said she hoped that she could use the time to re-establish her credit and get back on her feet. "I was just naive and just believing that nobody could be that dishonest," she said.

But when she contacted the people four months later to check on the status of the purchase, she was told that they had changed their minds and were no longer interested in buying her home.

By then, she was six months behind in her payments. The bank that held her mortgage filed for foreclosure and was planning to sell her home. But the bank also suggested that she contact the Community Development Corporation of Utah.

"I had a date to sell my home and everything, but they stopped it when I went to CDC," she said.

The agency helped her work out a plan with her bank to modify her loan, which would allow her to keep her house.

Hanson said her agency gets about 20 new clients each month, with about 80 percent having household incomes that are below 80 percent of the area median income. For a family of four, the area median income is about $65,000, so below 80 percent would be below $52,000, she said, "definitely lower-middle class."

People get into difficulty for a variety of reasons, she said. Most of her foreclosure clients are struggling with the rising cost of living, as well as credit issues stemming from "bad loans." Many people received adjustable rate or interest-only loans because they couldn't qualify for conventional loans.

Wood said Utahns now have 50,000 subprime mortgages, and 70 percent of those mortgages carry adjustable rates that are resetting primarily in 2008 and 2009. Other factors that raise the risk of foreclosure are high loan-to-value, piggyback and interest-only loans.

Hanson said her financially troubled clients often were able to obtain financing when there were some fairly obvious warning signs that they were poor credit risks, which essentially set them up for potential failure, she said.

Her agency's foreclosure counseling has increased by about 35 percent in the past year, and the number of foreclosure inquiries has increased by about 60 percent, she said.