Keri Weishaar lives in a spacious, four-bedroom house near Tampa, Florida, thanks to the easy financing that prevailed during last decade’s housing boom.

“It was basically nothing to get into this house,” said Weishaar, 48, who bought the house in the spring of 2003 after obtaining a no-money down, adjustable-rate mortgage.

Then again, Weishaar and her husband are fortunate to still have their home. That same mortgage eventually morphed into a financial albatross and, for a time, the house in the suburb of Tarpon Springs was on a countdown to foreclosure.

As home values plummeted after the housing bubble burst in 2007, many borrowers with exotic types of loans were stuck, unable to refinance as lenders began to tighten their lending criteria. That set the stage for cascading mortgage defaults that eventually took down Lehman Brothers, Wall Street’s fourth-biggest investment bank at the time, 10 years ago this week. Lehman and other financial institutions were big buyers of securities backed by some of these dicey mortgages.

Today, getting a mortgage is tougher — and less risky. For one thing, no-money down mortgages and their ilk, which enabled many borrowers to initially lower the costs of buying a home but often saddled borrowers with far higher balances or steep monthly payment increases, have vanished.

Banks also remain a bit gun-shy after racking up billions in losses stemming from mortgages gone bad. That means homebuyers, especially those with less-than-stellar credit, face more hurdles qualifying for a mortgage than they did in the housing boom years. But the loans are safer, more transparent and actually take into account whether a borrower can afford to keep up with payments.

“The banks have certainly loosened underwriting criteria for low-risk borrowers; they haven’t loosened underwriting criteria for low-credit score borrowers,” said Aaron Terrazas, senior economist at Zillow. “The types of lending that we saw leading up to that crash in 2008, for the most part, we’re not seeing nowadays.”

When interest rates began to plummet at the start of the 2000s, lenders rushed in to make nontraditional loans that could be sold for hefty profits to Wall Street banks, as well as government-sponsored mortgage buyers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

These riskiest of these loans required little proof that the borrower could afford to pay them back and an initial period of low payments and interest rates. Some let borrowers defer interest payments. Ultimately, these loans overwhelmed many borrowers’ ability to keep up with payments.

That’s what happened with Weishaar’s mortgage. The loan was scheduled to adjust to a higher rate after three years, but she was able to refinance it with another adjustable-rate mortgage. The next time it reset, however, was late 2007, as the housing downturn accelerated. Her husband had lost his job and she was making less money. The couple’s loan jumped from a 6.2 percent interest rate to 11 percent, jacking up the monthly payment from $2,101 to $3,417.