[KarenInCa]

Laurie-
I have mixed feelings about fund raisers. I know that it is expensive. DH and I used the money we were going to use to purchase a house (which we do not own yet), and borrowed $5,000 from my 401K for our adoption. So, we know that it can be a struggle to adopt a child. Money is very tight for us right now. We still have to buy our plane tickets and I am hoping to take 3 months off work to be able to stay home with our daughter longer than 6 weeks.

Garage sales or working overtime, or starting a home business are all wonderful ways to gain extra money for an adoption, especially now that the wait time is so long. The ONE (and only) thing I appreciated with our long wait was that it gave us 3-4 extra months to build up the funds than we had originally anticipated to save more money.

A potluck is not something I have ever seen for adoption. It weighs more on the side of giving something back. I like the idea, if you can get enough people to participate. Do you belong to a religous congregation? If you do, that would be a wonderful way for people to help out if they want to, without the guilt.

The most successful ways that we've obtained extra money is working overtime, lots of overtime, even when I don't feel like working at all. We took out money from my 401k, we went through our budget and stopped some monthly recurring charges for entertainment that we really didn't need, which we can start again later, if we choose to, but for now it saves us money. We also moved all of our credit card debt to one new credit card a year ago, with zero balance transfer for 12 months, and we paid it off without paying any interest.