After a divorce slashed her budget, she settled for a cramped condominium in Peekskill and began looking for her first full-time job in decades.
Now, the 60-year-old risks losing even her downsized dreams, as payments on her subprime mortgage rise beyond her means and a yearlong effort to sell her two-bedroom townhouse has yielded no offers.
"I accepted an adjustable-rate mortgage, thinking, 'I'll only be here a few years, it's just a place to land,' " she explained. "But then, the real estate market fell apart, and things just stopped selling."
A single woman with two children, Becker is facing the threat of foreclosure. Her husband handled the finances during their 19-year marriage, she said, while she focused on arranging their disabled son's treatments and care. When she decided to renovate and refinance her condo in 2005, she blindly trusted the first mortgage broker she found: New Century Mortgage, a company that went bankrupt this year, passing her loan to another lender, Carrington Mortgage Services Inc.
Her alimony stopped this year, and she began getting help from her brother and found a part-time job as a teacher's aide at Lakeland-Copper Beach Middle School in Yorktown. But she can't keep up with her rising mortgage payments, which jumped from 9.8 percent to 11.3 percent in the past year. Next month, the rate will rise to nearly 12 percent, continuing to increase every six months after that.
In October, she missed her first payment; she sent the check a few weeks later, but then missed last month's payment. Unless she finds a full-time job or gets an offer on her house - preferably both, she hopes - the cycle will continue to destroy her already-weak credit, and she could lose her home next year.
"I'm a person that likes to pay my bills," she said, shaking her head over her messy pile of financial documents. "Why isn't this banking industry, this mortgage and loan industry, more in favor of helping people stay in their homes? They don't even try to help you. They're motivated by greed."
When Con Edison cut her service in September, sympathetic neighbor Jeanette Gould, 70, came to the rescue, writing the $281.17 check that Becker said she had needed three more days to pay.
"When I was in that stage of the game, I had my power turned off once," Gould said, adding that an inheritance is the only thing that kept her from ending up in Becker's situation. "I've given her a number of small loans. She needs to find a job, and she is trying."
Prompted by her neighbor's good-natured scolding, Becker admits there are steps she could have taken to protect herself. If she could turn back time, she would pay more attention to her marital finances. She wishes she had shopped around for a better mortgage, both in 2003 and when she refinanced in 2005. She would not have spent $15,000 remodeling the condo, a decision that had seemed like a smart investment last year, given that she planned to sell.
"I just figured anything that I did was going to add to the value of the house," she said, noting that the asking price is now only $30,000 more than what she paid four years ago.
She would like to move to a cheaper area, but said the custody agreement for her 12-year-old daughter locks her into the Lower Hudson Valley or northern New Jersey. She's also weighing an unsolicited offer to refinance her mortgage, which would give her a 7.25 percent rate, with $400 less in monthly payments, but at least another $5,000 to her long-term debt.
"I'll be in the same position, but I'll have a fixed rate and a lower monthly payment, so maybe that would work until I can sell the house," she said. "It's all really scary."
Once her condo sells, she'll just have to find another house - with another mortgage. This time, though, she plans to be much more careful about what she signs.
She worries about others who haven't yet learned her lessons. Many aspiring homeowners on fixed budgets don't realize that lenders aren't worried about giving them a mortgage they can't afford, she said.
"I'm a lot more savvy than I used to be," Becker said. "These people are not your friends. They get you set up in a house, they get you all happy and stuff, and then you find out you can't pay for it. I don't understand what the sense of it is, to stick people in situations."
Ultimately, Becker considers herself a survivor - of divorce, of breast cancer, of raising a child with special needs. Most days, she's cautiously confident she can survive a bad mortgage, too.
"I would love to win the lotto," she said, chuckling. "But, in the meantime, I can't make myself crazy. I'm hoping to sell this house and buy something with a smaller mortgage. I'm basically going to be in the same spot, but I'm hoping by then I'll be working, too. I'm hopeful that things are going to work out."
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