At the beginning of 2008, with the stains of foreclosure and bankruptcy still muddying her credit report, Jane Sullivan almost couldn't believe she was buying a home again.

Just eight years earlier, Sullivan's ex-husband had cleaned out her bank accounts while she was in the hospital delivering their third daughter. The bank foreclosed on Sullivan's Miami Lakes home.

She needed a place to live, a job that would accommodate a new mother and help supporting her older daughters, one in high school and the other in college. But her sullied credit was holding her back.

As the number of foreclosures in South Florida and around the country escalates, thousands of people are finding themselves in the situation where Sullivan was nearly 10 years ago, with their emotions shredded and their finances in disarray. Some still aren't able to buy a decade later.

``This is a traumatic experience,'' said Howard Dvorkin, founder of the nonprofit Consolidated Credit Counseling Services in Fort Lauderdale, especially ``if you have equity in your home, if you have children and you have to uproot them.''

He said home ownership may not happen again for many of these families.

In Sullivan's case, her resolve outweighed the unwanted marks on her credit.

``You do what you have to do to pay the bills,'' said Sullivan, 54. ``You've got to get yourself out.''

With no money for an attorney, Sullivan represented herself and declared bankruptcy in 2002. She begged a Bank of America branch manager for a checking account. She got two credit cards with limits of $300, just so she could improve her credit score by paying them on time, every month.

HELP FROM HER BOSS

She got a job doing a little bit of everything at the Miami nonprofit Tools for Change. Her boss asked a landlord she knew to rent Sullivan an apartment based on her recommendation. She lived there four years and was never late with the rent.

After Hurricane Wilma, she took the skills she learned at the nonprofit to get a job as a grant writer with the city of Lauderhill.

Then in 2007, developers broke ground on a 26-home affordable housing project in the town where she worked.

Sullivan qualified -- even though the foreclosure and bankruptcy were still on her credit report.

``Bank of America said `Give me an explanation,' '' Sullivan said. ``Oh, I had an explanation.''

She got the mortgage, in part because the old blemishes were partially outweighed by her spotless payment history -- on everything else -- ever since.

Grant money helped cut the cost of the house by $60,000, leaving her responsible for a $98,000 mortgage on the three-bedroom house she now calls home.

Sullivan started calling one of the units home in February of 2008.

``A lot of people say I just met the right people,'' she said. ``There's enough of the `right people' out there.''

But for Audrey Rodriguez, home ownership remains elusive after she lost her Miramar home in 1997. Rodriguez was in the midst of pursuing a dream to own a school with rigid discipline and a strict abstinence-only Christian message.

She started the school in a Lutheran church in Miami, and eventually moved it to Hollywood, taking over the mortgage of an existing school on Madison Street.

But all of the expenses of the new property combined with the mortgage on her home, plus taxes, utilities and repairs at both sites, she said, ``I knew I had to let one of them go.''

The same week she closed on the school in 1997, she lost the house.

``It was gorgeous,'' she said of the five-bedroom, two-bath home with custom-made furniture and built-ins.

So as her school flourished -- the 20th-anniversary celebration will be in January -- the 61-year-old mother of five has made it into a home of sorts.

``The kids call me grandma, guardian, auntie -- whatever,'' she said of the 120 students at Aukela Christian Military Academy in Hollywood. ``All of these children are my children.''

She, her husband and two of her kids even lived in an apartment at the school for the first two years after they lost their house.

It's the first place any money that might otherwise become a down payment on another house seems to wind up.

``Every time I get a little bit, I put it back in the school,'' she said.

She and her husband rent a home from their church in Hollywood. But she has found herself buying the kinds of things that might fit into a new home someday: faucets, bookshelves, a chandelier.

``I believe that it's going to happen,'' she said. ``I don't know when.''

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