[BlessedbySnuggs]

Just curious...if you are willing to share.

Did you save all the money beforehand?

Borrow some?

Use credit cards?

Re-finance your home/home equity loan?

Adoption Grants/fundraisers?

Our first adoption we were very blessed to receive a very large loan from our family (have paid back most of it)...we also borrowed some against our 401K and are currently repaying that amount.

We are currently thinking of ways to "afford" our 2nd adoption. We don't plan on starting again for another year or two, but I am already a little worried with the possible expenses. The way the economy is, I am not sure if we will be able to refinance or take out a home equity loan. Did anyone take advantage of this option?

Anyway, I am just curious to hear how everyone afforded it, if you are willing to share.

ETA: Our first adoption ended up costing us SO MUCH MONEY! Not sure how we will afford the second one. Also, ETA, that we probably won't be able to borrow the amount of money again from our family, as they are getting ready to retire and will need the money.

[minibus]

We saved for a while and also happened to get some money from my dad when my grandfather passed away. We would have had enough without that, though. I'm a terribly frugal person by nature and wouldn't have been willing to go into debt to adopt, when raising a child is so expensive in and of itself!

[Stormster]

We used our savings. When we needed more we borrowed from my Dad and paid him back with DH's employee adoption benefit. I will say we did put may "extras" on credit cards and hopefully will pay those off with our tax credit.

[MamaS]

Saved what I thought was enough before starting Sissy's adoption. (It wasn't!) Borrowed some from relatives, took out a bank loan, had yard sales, borrowed some more, cashed in some savings bonds, and finally paid off everything four years after Sassy arrived!

[sheababy]

We did take advantage of a HELOC. Which stinks since our house has declined in value by 25% since then and we hoped to move to a larger house (but we knew we may have to wait). Our expenses were expected to be spread over a two year period so we tried to save for the big items-marketing fee -$8800, placement fee - $7800 and then just put money away for the rest knowing if we had to we could put travel expenses, bmom expenses on a credit card.

We tried to save beforehand as we did not have the added expense of the baby. Our adoption was $27k. Currently we are paying $13k per year for childcare. We put ourselves in the mindset of "If we have a baby-we will have at least 13k in expense per year so if we can't save that now, how will we afford a baby?" So we tightened our belt and started putting away $250/wk (13k per year). Of course we only waited 9 months so that plan was out the window and thus the HELOC.

Before all this mess with economy, there were some banks that did low cost adoption loans-not sure if this is still the case. I know with our declining home value, we couldn't have done the HELOC today. We also saved any extra money-tax refunds etc. We set up 3 90 day CD's with our bank that we could add funds to anytime we wanted. We had one maturing every month so that we were earning interest but we could still take it out without losing much money. I liked that because I could make a direct deposit or transfer money on-line into the CD but had to call the bank to take money out. It made it inconvenient enough not to be tempted to use it for other purposes.

[finallyamom0310]

We completed some work on the house and refinanced when the market was good. Borrowed the rest from my father.

[karla-k]

We are adopting internationally and after all is said and done it will cost about $47000.

I resigned my teaching position before we started the process, but still had 4 months of paychecks coming, so we socked all of that away since we would be living on one income anyway, we just started 4 months earlier. That netted us about $10,000.

We used our tax return and the tax stimulus rebate: $6000 total.

We received a matching grant of $3000 that we had to get donations from family and friends to get the grant. We received $13200 in donations from that, plus the grant, so $16200.

We had a fundraising dinner in October, presold tickets for $10 a plate for a brisket dinner and made $2900! That was a huge blessing.

We also received about $2000 gift from our church and other individuals.

We do have plane tickets from our trip 1 still on our credit card that we are chipping away at, but our tax credit should take care of whatever we can't pay off on our own.

We must give God all the glory for supplying all that we have needed for this adoption! It has been an amazing journey of seeing God's faithfulness come shining through!!!

[Fran27]

Our family helped with most of it... The rest was savings.

[devildogwife]

Let's see, my DH was deployed for a long time and we saved almost all of that, and I worked while he was deployed. We got an interest free loan from my grandfather and also a line of credit. We're hoping to have it all paid off within a couple years.

[mandirenee]

After spending our savings on fertility treatments (over $20,000) we had to borrow.

We have a loan from family, which we paid the tax credit and employee benefit towards and we are still paying the remainder. Total cost was $29,000

This time around we are borrowing from retirment, BUT the entire cost of the adoption will be reimbursed with the Tax credit and employee benefits. We just wouldn't accept any situations over $15,000.

[aallen25]

We were were able to save up the money needed during DH's deployment a couple of years before we decided to adopt. We did end up borrowing a tiny bit from my parents just so we would have some money in our savings after all was said and done.

[shellers]

My company has an adoption benefit which wil reimburse us up to $10,00 per child. We have not completed our adoption yet, but have some money in savings and we will have to get some loans in the process.

[bethy724]

I'm sure people know this - but I adopted thru foster care & was reimbursed for the lawyer expenses-it was free. I know everybiody doesn't want to go on the foster care roller coaster but my son came to me at 3 months & physically healthy.

[sbaglio]

We saved the entire anticipated amount before starting our homestudy, and continued to save while we waited to be matched. It involved extreme cost-cutting measures!

[tweetybirdus]

We took out a home equity line of credit that we can borrow from for up to 20 years as long as we're still living in our house.