Candidate says meltdown put her home in jeopardy

A candidate for Congress said she is taking steps to prevent the foreclosure of her Lake Tahoe home.

Douglas County School Board President Cindy Olivas-Trigg, who is seeking Dean Heller's Second Congressional seat, said the sale of the Lakeview Terrace home she owns with husband William has been postponed while she and her husband cash out their 401K to come up with the $436,000 owed.

The foreclosure sale has been advertised in The Record-Courier as taking place May 20 at the Douglas County Courthouse.

"The sale has been postponed until July," she said. "It's not going to happen. We're very fortunate we still have 401K money available."

Trigg said the downturn substantially hurt the couple's business.

"We have a small real estate business and we're hurting like everyone else," she said. "We had seven empty rentals consecutively over 10 weeks, including some long-time rentals. My husband (an airline pilot) was off for eight months on minimum pay."

Trigg said the couple purchased their rental properties with 30 percent down, but when the renters were laid off, the money stopped coming in.

"Nobody knew this was going to happen," she said. "We put one of the rentals up for sale, figuring we'd sell that and go forward, but we couldn't sell anything."

Trigg said she sought to refinance, but had to wait a month to be turned down by the bank.

The couple decided to default on their house, so they could pull money from their retirement fund to pay it off.

"They won't let you withdraw from the 401K to save the business," she said. "It has to be your primary residence."

Trigg said she started the process in February and was told it would take 30 days.

"I'd planned to deal with it before I made the announcement," she said. "It was the end of March before we started seeing things move forward. We have the funds to bring it current, but you can't go in there and just hand them the money."

Trigg said she may lose one or two of the rental properties, but that under the circumstances that's not too bad.

"We had to figure out how to work this out, and things continued to snowball," she said. "This process is really is difficult for a lot of people. I'm not advocating having too much debt, but the process should be understandable for people."