Adoption Support at Forever Parents

Financing An Adoption

Adoption can be very costly (with the exception of adopting through foster care) and we asked our adoption forum members for advice on how they financed their adoption.

** We’re saving, saving, saving. If we wait as long as our agency says the average is–15-18 months–we’ll have enough to cover agency fees and probably attorney costs by the time the baby is born. If it happens sooner, we’ll use the available space on our home equity line of credit to make up the difference. If it happens later, I guess we’ll have extra money…we can have dinner at an expensive restaurant and weep into our costly wine over the lack of a baby. Our agency fees, by the way, are an $850 application fee (which we will send with our completed materials, probably in the next week or two), and a total of about $9000 in agency fees. Attorney fees will probably be about $1200. We’ll also have travel costs when the baby is born, since our agency is in a city about four hours away from us…but I can’t deal with trying to estimate what that will be and trying to save for it on top of the $600/month we’re already squeezing out of the budget for the adoption fees. I’m also not trying to guess what birthmother expenses we might have…I haven’t even managed to think through the question of what we are willing to pay for bm expenses. So I’m sure there will be some increase in debt associated with the adoption as well. We’ve already paid for the home study with previous savings.

** Saving, scrimping, robbing Peter to pay Paul … we basically paid cash for everything when all was said and done. The second time around, I’m considering asking my family for help in the form of personal loans … I have a very wealthy older brother and another who is fairly well off, so I might be able to get some short term loans from them if I’m nice.

** My dh dipped into his 401K and then paid himself back.

** We refianced our house and took money out to pay for our adoption.

** For the next to the last, we re-financed our home and borrowed more. It was smart to do anyway (the refinancing) because the interest rate was considerably lower (fixed, 30yr at 5.876%.)
For the most recent baby, we HAD gone to various banks who gave us strange looks at the suggestion that they might give an adoption loan! Finally, we DID find one bank that would; but the interest rate was higher than I could get through my Discover Card (unsecured loan). We took out a loan with them, (around 7 or 9% as I recall), then ended up combining this amount with an existing loan on farm ground. The result ended up being one loan at 7%. We’re still paying on this one. But, I’m finding that in hopes of having another……fees are SO much higher and although our attorney and agency have said they’d take payments……….just don’t know now if we can come up with that much cash anymore! we know we could take out another loan, but hate doing this too.

** I have a wonderful family member that loaned us $20,000, at 0% interest and we can pay it back at our convenience.

** home equity loan

** Our agency took monthly payments. We paid mostly cash and borrowed a little from dh’s 401k. I couldn’t tell you where the extra money came from. This time around I’m working part time, so we are trying to save for the first couple of payments and finish paying with the adoption tax credit refund in 2007.

** We put both adoptions on our credit card by taking out a cash advance and then going to the bank for a certified bank check for the agency. We did not have to pay for very much prior to placement. The little things we paid cash for. Dh is very good about bouncing it from card to card to get “0%” interest (or very minimal %). We have found that the bigger the sum of money we borrowed on a credit card, the more the credit card companies solicited us to join them and offered us great deals to do so. We did pay off adoption 1 before starting adoption 2.

Related Tags: adopt, adoption, adopting

Related Posts:

1. Financing an Adoption
2. Complaints about Adoption Services Worldwide
3. Adoption Agency Fraud
4. 10 Things Your Adoption Agency Won’t Tell You
5. 13 Ways To Help Finance An Adoption