Guest Article: Adoption Costs and Decisions
You know, I wrote a guest post for Nickel (of FiveCentNickel.com fame) on his Raising4Boys site, and I totally forgot to mention it here!
I did an extensive write-up of what we found so far while doing our adoption investigation. I highlight the costs of adoption, some benefits you can find to help pay those costs, and some deciding factors to help determine what type of adoption might be right for you.
Since we’re still in the process of finding the right agency, I also included some important questions to ask when researching agencies on your own. We’re only in the early stages, and we have not yet attended an information session on international adoption (only domestic, and only one agency), but I’ve been reading quite a bit on forums, magazines, and most importantly, books from the library.
One thing I want to comment on is that most people are qualified to adopt, and there is enough monetary assistance (federal, state and private) to help pay those costs if you really want to adopt (they might not cover a $45k Russian adoption, but they’ll go a long way on a domestic adoption). I do want to warn, though, that learning about all the requirements from the state and private agencies (and other countries if you do international) can be very overwhelming.
I was so discouraged when we left the info session with the domestic agency, and actually asked myself “Why are we doing this? Why don’t we just try to have our own baby?”. But then I immediately remembered our purpose. We want to help at least one child who was brought into this world without a family to care for him or her, before attempting to conceive a child. (I tried to word that carefully, as I know birth parents give up their children for adoption for many reasons).
So go check out the article, and check out Raising4Boys. Nickel provides hundreds of great parenting nuggets for you to chew on!
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Clever,
My wife and I adopted our son at 7 days old. He is 21 months now, and it have been more amazing than I could have imagined. We don’t plan on having any biological children at this time, and just handed in the paperwork for our second adoption. We had been looking into international adoption, but decided that wasn’t where we were being called. For an international adoption agency we were very impressed with the care the Wide Horizons took to protect the children in their system.
I will also say that for our first adoption all of our expenses were covered(albeit post adoption). Between the 11,000 tax credit, and a 2,000 employer assistance it covered all of our expenses, plus a tiny sum.
2 neices of mine were adopted. LOVELY! Absolutely the most wonderful thing.
This is very encouraging as I’ve always wanted to either foster or adopt children when I’m ready to have my own family. I’d wondered about the costs as they seemed prohibitive, but it seems much more financially feasible than I had originally thought.