My Truck is on FIRE?!

Hello Everyone,

I am currently on here to try to get some help and protect my livelyhood. My name is Joseph Kotermanski I own a small company out of my home in Michigan. What my company does is construction, building remodeling, home building, and snow removal. With the way the economy has been not too many people can afford to build or are building, especially with the smaller companies like mine that cannot give them what the bigger ones offer. In the meantime, I have been focusing on doing construction projects and remodels and snow removal which I have been doing for 30 years.

I have had two trucks in the early part of the decade a '99 and '00 F-350 for my business. As time went on I started having problems with the '99 so I started to use the '00 as my main truck to and from work before I retired from Ford. Well needless to say, I took a retirement from Ford just before the economic downturn. Things needless to say got tough and business that I thought that would be there upon my retirement was not and had to use a lot of my pension and savings to get by. Well to make matters worse in December of 2010, I went out to start my truck and warm it up, came back in the house, then five minutes later hear a horn beeping constantly in my driveway. I open up the door to my house and the lady in the car beeping the horn yells, "your truck is on fire!" I was shocked ran to the side of my house where the truck was parked and it was up in flames! I attempted to put it out with a fire extiguisher that I had in my garage but to no evail it did not work. My wife was on the phone with 911 and talk about not only scaring her, I scared my son who works at the fire dept where we live and heard the call to respond to his parents house for a fire. The fire dept did a great job of putting it out however the cab was completely gone and the insurance company totaled it.

Now you are probably thinking what about the '99 you still have that. That is correct I did still have that truck while it sat over the year, from having a salter in the bed of the truck and just being 11 years old took its toll on the truck. I used the money from the totalled vehicle to get the '99 back up to speed and in working order. It needed new brakes and lines, a new bed, and tailgate and bumper that was all caused by the salt erosion and the nature of the business. I have been using the '99 since and now it is on its last leg. I have been constantly putting band-aids on things that don't seem to hold as by the time I fix one thing another goes wrong. Not to mention when I got the new bed it was white in color and was the cheapest I found. However, it doesn't match the rest of my truck that was black. So I have been driving around a black and white colored truck, its embarassing.

I am on here to look for a little bit of help to get me going towards the purchase of a new truck. Like I mentioned, with putting band-aids on the truck, it makes it hard to save the money needed for the purchase. I am in need of the truck not only for my snow removal business but for the construction aspect as well. I would hope people would like to get involved in my raising of funds because they would support a hard working, middle class man trying to live the American dream by having a great business and provide for his family. Any support would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Joseph Kotermanski