[jaenelle]

... and if so, how much? There's a situation DH and I have been offered, but it's about 7 or 8 THOUSAND dollars more than we were hoping to spend. It sounds like a great situation though. I have no idea if we'd be chosen, obviously, but I'm wondering if we shouldn't submit ourselves anyway. I think we could scrape up enough extra money to make up the difference between what we were hoping to spend and what we'd have to spend if we were chosen this time.

So, did you submit yourselves for or accept a situation that was more expensive than you planned? What did you do to come up with the extra money?

[kelceesmom]

When we first went with our facilitator we let her know that we had a budget of about $15,000. We wanted to let her know so that she didn't show our profile to people who would need more support than we could give. We were presented, chosen and started down our path. About 3 weeks into our journey the help part came up, (needing assistance with rent, food, phone etc.) It was minimal really on a month to month basis but in the end we spent closer to $22,000. I believe it is ok to stick to your original plans. To come up with like you believe 7-8 grand more could hurt in the long run. But for any potential adoptive parents knowing now what I know I would always budget and extra $5000 for incidentals. We did a domestic adoption if that helps. Every situation is definately different though.

[jaenelle]

Well, the agency that we are signed up with has an agency fee of $13,000 which includes basically everything but travel and finalization expenses. Which is great, but they have NO situations that we qualify for even coming up, to my knowledge. We aren't open to any drug or alcohol use, which really hurts our chances, I think.

So we signed up with a referral service that has quite a few situations -- unfortunately, none of them have been less than about $18,000.

So I guess, I'm kind of stuck. Do we go ahead and wait for the cheaper place to have situations -- which they're quoting 6 to 9 months for that -- or do we go ahead and submit ourselves for things that would be sooner, but cost more?

Just rambling, I guess. Anyway, thanks for your advice.

[kelceesmom]

When we signed I stated the same thing about drugs and alcohol. I stuck to my guns about the alcohol since I have seen first hand what it can do. I did loosen my strings just a tad about drugs only for the fact that if a bmom uses marijuana occassionally statistics show that very rarely is there any complications such as withdrawels or low birthweight. Just putting it out there in case it can open your perameters a bit. As for the $ I would lay out all the pros and cons of using or saving it now. Or what you might do with the extra $ if you wait a little longer. If you look at my signature you can see from start to the birth of our daughter it was only about 7 months. So, for me 6-9 months seems pretty good to me. Sorry to ramble and good luck in your journey.