Terry Jolly had planted a Colorado blue spruce tree in front of her northeast Bend split-level home to mark her daughter’s first birthday. The evergreen tree now towers over the house and reminds Jolly how much her daughter, now 27, has grown.

“There’s a lot of emotion tied to this house,” Jolly, 62, said. She continues to live in the 1,800-square-foot home even though she and her two large dogs are the only occupants.

But keeping her family home has come with its fair share of heartache for Jolly, who took out a second mortgage on her home in 2007 after nearly a decade of personal and health problems. Jolly lost her job about three years later — when she was five years short of retirement — and almost lost her home because she could no longer make its payments.

“I was so stressed out and so scared that I was crying every day,” said Jolly, who often had to talk to at least two or three people every time she called the bank to talk about her loan. “I didn’t even want to talk to my friends about it.”

Jolly found help through NeighborImpact’s HomeSource foreclosure prevention program and is now paying down her mortgage through an arrangement that satisfies both her and her lender.

Representatives of Neighbor-Impact, a Redmond-based community nonprofit, said even though the brunt of Central Oregon’s foreclosure crisis may be over, they are still receiving about 12 phone calls a week from people who may lose their homes. About 20 to 25 percent of these people are 60 or older.

While people in this age group have not been disproportionately affected by foreclosures over the past two years, many of them are at-risk because they may have a harder time finding new work in a tight job market, are more likely to incur high medical costs if they get sick and have a higher incidence of widowhood than the general population.

Any one of these instances could wreck their financial situation and put them at risk of losing their homes if they fall behind on their mortgage payments. Foreclosure specialists with NeighborImpact said the process is even worse for senior citizens because they are less likely to seek help when they experience financial problems.

The risks

When Jolly and her husband got a divorce in 1991, she made a conscious decision to keep her house so her two children — then 8 and 4 years old — could have some connection to the earliest part of their childhood.

“I wanted to keep it as their home,” she said.

Though she spent most of her time as a stay-at-home mom, Jolly waited tables and worked for a landscaping company part-time to earn some cash. She also took out a $54,000 mortgage on her home in 1994, according to the Deschutes County Clerk’s office, and was able to pay it.

But Jolly’s life took a sharp turn between 1998 and ’99 when her father died and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her mother came to visit during that time, was diagnosed with brain cancer and died less than a year later.

Jolly struggled emotionally, physically and financially. She took two more mortgages out against her home — using part of each loan to pay off her previous mortgage’s balance — in 2003 and 2005.

During the years that followed, Jolly went back to school and became a licensed substance abuse counselor. She found a full-time job after an internship with the AmeriCorps program and seemed to be on a path toward stability.

But Jolly’s luck changed once more in 2007 when her breast cancer came out of remission. That same year Jolly took out a $150,000 mortgage on her home, which was worth $130,000 at the time, according to the Deschutes County Assessor’s office.

Lynne McConnell, the associate director of Neighbor-Impact’s HomeSource program, said a lot of her agency’s older clients have been through similar circumstances before they fell behind on their house payments.

“They had a plan and that plan got interrupted,” she said.

If someone in this age group has a mortgage on their house, McConnell said, they’re usually doing fine paying down the debt until they reach one crucial moment — the loss of a spouse, the loss of a job or unexpected medical bills — that serves as breaking point and sends their payment plans flying off the tracks. McConnell said she’s even seen some cases where foreclosure proceedings have been brought against parents because they cosigned for a mortgage that one of their children could no longer pay.

Jolly hit her breaking point in 2010: After taking time off from her job to celebrate her 60th birthday, she learned she had been laid off.

Immediately after losing her job, Jolly started collecting unemployment and used that to cover most of her bills.

She also received help from the state’s Mortgage Payment Assistance Unemployment program — a now defunct program managed by the Oregon Homeownership Stabilization Initiative that gave people who lost their jobs a year’s worth of mortgage payment assistance — to help cover her debts and stay in her home.

But these payments didn’t always come in on time and Jolly said she often found herself on the phone with her lender trying to explain her situation to a chorus of people who needed to hear her story from start to finish. She pleaded for help and found the person on the other end of the line was unsympathetic at best.

“I asked one person, ‘What can I do?’” Jolly said, recalling a phone conversation. “And he said: ‘Get a job.’”

Less than two years after she lost her job, Jolly’s lender filed a notice of default and election to sell with the Deschutes County Clerk’s office. Jolly found this document attached to her front door along with a notice that her home would be auctioned off at Deschutes County Courthouse on Nov. 15, 2012, if she didn’t immediately come up with a way to pay off her debt.

The numbers

Central Oregon saw an explosion in foreclosures several years ago in line with the nation’s mortgage crisis.

The number of completed foreclosures in Central Oregon declined significantly last year. Only 102 homes in Bend and Redmond went into foreclosure and were sold by banks in 2013 compared with the 423 homes that completed this process in 2012.

But housing advocates and attorneys representing homeowners and lenders have cautioned about a potential backlog of years-old cases awaiting resolution, prompted by a 2012 foreclosure mediation law and an Oregon Court of Appeals ruling that inadvertently shifted thousands of cases from Oregon’s nonjudicial foreclosure track into circuit courts across the state, slowing down the process.

Deschutes County Circuit Court received more than 1,300 case filings for initial foreclosure hearings between January 2012 and July of last year. By contrast, in 2010 and 2011, generally considered the height of the foreclosure crisis, the court received just 208. It’s unclear just how many of the recent cases have reached a resolution.

McConnell said NeighborImpact’s foreclosure prevention specialists logged 285 closed cases — situations where someone came to the community group’s office for help, worked directly with one of their counselors and reached a resolution to their case that was either good or bad — from July 2011 to July 2013.

She said 63 of the homeowners involved, or about 22 percent, were 60 or older.

People 65 and older make up about 30 percent of Deschutes County’s homeowners, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey.

McConnell and Ann Kelly, the foreclosure specialist who worked directly with Jolly’s case, said they expect to see the pattern — where older people make up about 20 to 25 percent of their clients — regardless of what happens with the foreclosure backlog.

But they also worry that these numbers could skyrocket in the future if the housing market continues to improve.

“A lot of that has to do with communities outside Bend,” McConnell said. “That has definitely been a hot area right now.”

McConnell said that if property values go up in the county’s outlying communities — places like Camp Sherman, Deschutes River Woods, Eagle Crest, Sunriver, Terrebonne and Tumalo — that may prompt banks and lending institutions to start foreclosure proceedings against people they had previously left alone because it wasn’t worth their time or money.

These communities, with the exception of Deschutes River Woods and Terrebonne, have significantly older populations than the rest of the county, according to the U.S. Census, which means a greater number of older homeowners could be forced out of their homes.

Making matters worse is a lot of older homeowners — particularly members of the Silent and Greatest generations who were born before 1945 — are unwilling to ask for help even if it could keep them from losing their homes.

“It’s hard to ask someone for help,” she said. “This is a generation who has made it for so long without asking for help and (coming to us) is a big decision to make.”

Even if an older person does come into her office, McConnell said, there’s little the foreclosure specialists can do for them. With the exception of a few programs designed to help veterans and their spouses, there are no options available to seniors that aren’t available to anybody else.

NeighborImpact ends up spending most of its time with older homeowners trying to negotiate reverse mortgages that would let them pay off their debts and avoid foreclosure, or pursuing loan modification plans that would reduce their payments to something they can afford. She said the latter option is particularly hard for older homeowners because many of them might be out of a job and could have a very difficult time of finding work because of their age.

“A lot of people just lose hope,” she said. “Going through this process is a daunting task for a lot of people and it can take years.”

Kelly said it took about two to three months worth of paperwork and a couple lucky breaks to get Jolly in a place where she no longer had to worry about losing her home.

Through the process, Jolly’s lender assigned her a designated case manager — instead of just put her to whomever answered the phone — who was willing to negotiate a loan modification plan that lowered Jolly’s payments and forgave some of her back debt.

Jolly contributed to this effort by taking a part-time job as a private home-health care provider and signing up for her Social Security benefits early, at age 62 instead of 65, to guarantee she could make the new payments and avoid falling behind on her loan again.

“She worked really hard,” Jolly said, explaining that Kelly often talked to her lender directly because being on the phone with them sometimes made her sick to her stomach. “I didn’t think it was going to go forward because of my past history but it did.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com

— County Government Reporter Elon Glucklich contributed to this report.