RENO, NV - Mark Nye never imagined himself at age 60, out of work, his unemployment benefits exhausted, perhaps weeks from losing the Lemmon Valley home he and his wife have owned for 11 years.

Mark left his job with a landscaping company just before the recession, looking for something with less stress and confident he could find it. That didn't happen.

“I never thought I'd be in this situation where I would not be employable,” he says. “I've always been able to walk into a business and find myself employed, but now I'm 60 years old."

They began falling behind in their mortgage payments. Still they soldiered on.

Until his business license ran out, he operated a small engine repair service. Now he finds occasional work in security during special events and his wife has a steady job.

Ironically, they are now able to make monthly payments, but they're a year behind and can't catch up. He’s tried to talk Citimortgage into just putting that year in arrears on the back end of their loan. Nothing doing was the answer.

“We now just have weeks from what they attorneys have advised us,” Nye says. “We can try to buy you some time before the judge signs off and the sheriffs come out.”

The Nyes have plenty of company in this neighborhood. While one out of every 634 homes nationwide received a foreclosure notice last month, here the rate was one out of 200, more than three times higher.

In fact, the North Valleys zip code 89506 ranks 86th in foreclosures out of the nation’s 40,000.

Those are the raw numbers. Behind each is someone like Mark Nye.

Out of options and almost out of time, he says he expects to have to start all over.

“I don't know what happens to all this stuff,” he says gesturing at his home and garage filled with his tools. “I don't know what happens with everything else that's here.”

It's not the material things, even the tools of his livelihood that worries him most. He'll sell some, store as much as he can, leave the rest and hopefully find some new place to live and begin again, but the family includes two horses, four dogs, two cats and a miniature Sicilian donkey. That’s the emotional dilemma that haunts him.

“We don't want to give up our pets. It's just been killing my wife,” he says.

At the moment all he can do is hope for a little more time, time enough to find a new home for them and hopefully their animals.

As he considers an uncertain future, this Vietnam vet who's never been unemployed before can only shake his head. “I don't know what these financial companies expect. Take your house and everything you've worked for so many years and I can’t believe our government lets them do it."