My name is Amanda. I found myself in a financial emergency the last 6 months. My family’s vehicle broke down, and we took all our money to the shop to have it fixed. The car did not drive out of the lot without the same issue happening. It has sat undrivable for 6 months since then. That was supposed to help us so that we did not have to continue to drive our Suburban down to Des Moines from Ames every day for work. We have been unable to get tags in our name because of past fines from a decade ago. We just drove our Suburban to get food for our 20-month-old. On the way home, in our driveway, we were pulled over for the tags being expired. This is the 5th time this has happened because we don’t have the money to start a payment plan to get tags for the vehicle in our name. We have been getting ticket after ticket but still needing to drive because we need to pay our bills. We are behind on rent, electric, any bill you can think of we are behind. Today when we were pulled over, they towed our only running vehicle, the Suburban. Which will cost us around $450 to get out of impound if we get it soon so it does not sit and rack up more money. We had the part to finally fix our BMW, and a mechanic that a friend recommended came to fix it last Saturday. He tore apart our BMW fixing it and said he needed another part to finish the job. We paid him half of what he wanted to fix it. We got the other part, but he has not come back to finish the job so that our other vehicle runs.

We need to get to work, to catch up on all of our bills. We need to get our vehicle out of impound and get plates for the vehicle. The only way we will not end up homeless is if my husband could get to work. So we heavily rely on a vehicle.

I have applied for assistance through every possible agency in Story County and been denied. I do not know what to do now. There is no other option than to figure out a way to get the money to get the Suburban out of impound. Even though both of our bank accounts are negative hundreds of dollars. The longer it is in impound, the more it will cost to get it out and the longer Ian cannot make it to work. He has to go to work to make money to get paid next week to pay on everything we owe.

I don’t know what else to do. Literally, anything will help us.

Any donations will go tword getting our car out of in pound, getting our second car fixed so my husband is able to get to work so we can start to catch back up on all of our bills and get out of this hole we are in.

Donations will also go tword our past due rent, past due utility bills. And if SNAP does not send out money for the month of November the money will help us feed our son.