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I adopted an infant from the foster care system another through a private agency. Depending on where you live foster care adoption can be a breeze or extremely difficult. It took us about a year and a half to get a newborn who was adoptable. We did the foster to adopt program and ended up fostering a total of 7 kids and adopting only 1. In the last year we have been called about two infant straight adoptions but have had to pass.
One of the tricks with the foster care system is that they expect you to serve your time to adopt an newborn. We had a CW who told us "you help us, we'll help you." Since we "helped out" we were first on the list for a newborn that was a good match for our home.
For private adoptions... look for agencies that have sliding scales or payment plans. There are adoption loans through banks and credit unions. I just found out that my credit union does adoption loans recently. When we adopted there was only one bank doing adoption loans.
We paid our private adoption fees with a loan from my 401K and then my employer and my DH's gave us adoption assistance. Then we applied for the adoption tax credit and our adoption ended up being close to free in the end.
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