Disabled SoRo Couple Facing Home Foreclosure
By Martha Slater

Sitting at the kitchen table in the South Royalton home that has been in his family for three generations, 47-year-old Franklin Irish speaks calmly, although he’s having trouble sleeping nights, faced with losing his home on Route 110.

Irish has severe heart problems that led to open heart surgery in 2004, and his wife, Vicki, is on insulin to treat her diabetes and is legally blind in one eye and completely blind in the other. The couple is now two months behind in their mortgage payments. They are being threatened with foreclosure by their mortgage company, unless they come up with the entire amount due by April 1.

When the couple got their mortgage several years ago, Franklin was working at Sears in West Lebanon, N.H. However, his worsening health problems forced him to go on medical leave. His modest disability check, combined with Vicki’s small monthly income from Social Security, has not been enough to keep up with their $1,118 monthly payments to the Countrywide Full Spectrum Lending Company, which is based in California but has an office in Nashua, N.H.

To them, the property is not just the place they live—it has additional sentimental value to Franklin since it’s the farmhouse his mother, Elsie Irish, was born, raised, and died in. He mortgaged it several years ago to pay for needed repairs to the property, which has been in the family since his grandparents, Frank and Queeno Martin first acquired it in the late 1930s.

"It would be really sad for us to lose this home because we’re the third generation of this family to live here," Vicki said. "His mom gave us the house when we got married in 1999."

"If we have to move, we have no place to go, and we’ll probably end up in a shelter," Franklin noted. "All of our relatives are financially strapped and can’t help us."

When Franklin’s health problems worsened last year, Vicki says she notified the company in September "that we would have trouble paying on time. I asked them what program they had to help us keep up, and they told me they recommended that we keep paying the principal and interest, which was over $1,000." (The remainder of their payment goes to property taxes and house insurance). 

"The only other option they told us about was a three-month forbearance with payments suspended for those three months, and a balloon payment of $4,500 due at the end of that period," Vicki added. "We did that, but it was even worse, because we ended up owing $1,495 per month. Frank was only getting $1,060 per month for short-term disability from Sears and I get just $250 per month Social Security."

They missed a payment for the first time in November, but paid $1,000 in December, and made payments of $1,495 each on January 15 and February 15. Vicki noted that the company now tells them that they must pay $6,980 by April 1, "and they can demand the whole $124,000 we owe on the mortgage if they want to."

After they heard from the company about the foreclosure earlier this month, Vicki called them and asked if she could send them the $800 she had saved.

"They told me no, they didn’t want that, because it was not a full payment and they would just send it back," she said. "They told me they have the right to do that. I don’t understand that because I think any payment would be better than none."

Now, Franklin’s disability money has run out and the couple is living on that $800 in savings and Vicki’s Social Security, plus getting food stamps from the state.

Over the winter, the couple has also had trouble keeping up with their utility bills, and say they would have "really been in trouble" if they hadn’t gotten some help from a fuel assistance program. Due to Franklin’s heart condition, they were able to declare a three-month medical emergency period so that the electricity and phone weren’t cut off, "but that period is used up, and we’ll owe all that now," Vicki explained.

Franklin has applied for permanent disability income because he has been diagnosed with advanced dilated cardiomyopathy (congestive heart failure) and the doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock say it looks like he won’t be able to ever go back to work. He was recently told that Senator Leahy’s office was working to expedite his disability case.

"If that comes through, I should have enough to make a reasonable mortgage payment," Frank said, "but the mortgage company doesn’t want to give us any more time.

"I’m not looking to get out of what I owe, but I’d like them to give us a break by making our payments smaller, so we can afford them. They say they don’t want our house, but they don’t seem to want to work with us to help us keep it. We feel like they set us up to fail."

"Up until Franklin had to quit work, we always paid on time," Vicki added. "The mortgage company representative that we talked with last week told us to keep in touch, but said they could start the foreclosure process at any time. Times are tough and I’ll bet we’re not the only ones with this problem."

The branch manager at Countrywide’s closest office, located in New Hampshire, told the Herald he couldn’t legally comment on the matter and suggested calling the office of the company’s president, Greg Lumsden. The Herald’s calls to that office and to the company’s customer service number were not returned.

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