Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender, said it will take a pretax restructuring charge of as much as $150 million to cut operations and as many as 12,000 jobs because of slower lending.

About $57 million of the expense will occur in the quarter ended Sept. 30, with the balance in the fourth quarter, Calabasas, California-based Countrywide said in a regulatory filing today. About $30 million to $35 million of the total is for termination benefits at Countrywide, which has said it may cut 12,000 jobs, or as much as 20 percent of its workforce.

The mortgage-lender lined up $12 billion of financing in September to weather a decline in investor demand for mortgages and reduced access to the commercial paper market, where it usually borrows money. Bank of America Corp., the nation’s second largest bank, in August invested $2 billion in Countrywide, easing concern that the mortgage company would file for bankruptcy.

Countrywide may announce charge-offs for bad loans totaling $1 billion over the next two quarters, Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst James Fotheringham wrote in a report today. Of that amount, he expects third-quarter writedowns of $500 million in mortgages and $350 million in “residuals,” or bonds backed by mortgages. [MORE]