"The bank just drug their feet, drug their feet, drug their feet. I had to refax 50-plus pages of documents to different departments," Vicki said. "It was like they didn't talk to each other."

The Herald's calls to SunTrust for comment were not returned.

The short sale fell through and Dec. 17, 2007, the Lees lost their home.

Today they are making a life for themselves in Tennessee and are still glad they made the move.

"All of our friends and relatives in Florida are struggling with taxes, insurance and everything," Vicki said. "At least we have hope."

Janie Smith

For Janie Smith, hope had all but run out when her lender, Wells Fargo, filed foreclosure on her 28th Avenue East home in Bradenton last June.

"It's not fun being on the edge of knowing that you could lose your house at any time," she says.

Smith, who was forced to quit her job as a bookkeeper at Albertson's after a 2004 car accident left her with chronic pain, struggled to keep current with payments.

Her husband, who also worked for Albertson's, lost his job to a store closure in 2006 and the couple had to resort to dipping into his retirement fund and severance package to pay bills and make the mortgage.

Smith's lender, Wells Fargo, filed for foreclosure on the home in June 2007.

She was able to stave off foreclosure by paying the lender $7,000 from her car accident settlement, but was still behind in payments, in part because she was spending $404 a month for COBRA health insurance.

"At one time I didn't have any health insurance and I have to have the (pain) medication Lyrica and that's $118 (per prescription) and I had to get my medicine," Smith recalls. "I had to write them a letter explaining my situation and what was going on, and then I had to do another six-month payment plan."

Just this month, Smith says, she received a letter from Wells Fargo, notifying her that she was current again on her payments of roughly $800 a month.

"It took almost two years of trying to work out plans with them to be able to get back on a normal schedule," Smith said. "They told me if I defaulted on any of my payments I would lose my home. That was it."

Smith now works part-time as a phlebotomist and is trying to get a full-time position.

"It's been hard," Smith said. "We've had our lights cut off a couple of times or our water cut off just so we could make the mortgage, because I'm not working a lot. There's a lot of things we've had to do without. We don't go fishing any more. We don't go to movies. We really don't do anything outside of the home; we don't usually drive because of the price of gas."

Francis Lyden

Francis Lyden was having difficulty keeping a tenant in his single-family investment home in the Covered Bridge Estates community in Ellenton.

Then his wife suffered a massive heart attack in 2006 and the medical bills began to mount.

Lyden, 67, resorted to selling his Fantastic Sams franchise in Ellenton to pay his wife's medical expenses and keep the mortgage on the home current.