[CarmJoeMom]

I am curious how much you paid prior to getting a referral? Since its such a long time for a referral, I would hate to fork out a ton of money and then something happens that you can't complete the adoption. Anything can happen in 3 years time!!!!

[karla-k]

we are adopting from Kyrgyzstan and by the time we get a referral we'll have spent about $12,000 of the expected $40,000.

$7000 of that is the country fees for the agency. The country fee for Kyrgyzstan is $20,000. We'll pay the balance when we accept a referral.

Karla

[emi]

I think we paid about 3/4 of the costs before referral and the remaining 1/4 at referral/ during travel.

I know that my agency allows you to switch countries during the wait if something were to happen, so that doesn't make it seem quite so bad.

[DrLaura]

I think ours was the home study and about half of the remaining agency fees...which probably totalled about 35-40% of the total expenses once you included travel. Probably even lower than that for most people since we didn't have to pay for a place to stay in Colombia.

[Bea-mommy]

We've paid about $10,000 so far, then will pay $16,500 upon getting a referral, plus travel fees.

It's definitely less than 50%, but I will say that we went through a 6-month period this year when we thought we would have to leave our agency and start over at a new one, and losing the $10,000 felt like a lot at the time.