Part 1
The adoption process can be difficult to navigate. Please join us this week as we walk through the steps to adoption.
Disclaimer: The steps I describe in this series are the steps we took toward adoption. This is our perspective on the steps to adoption.
This is to me is the most important step...finances.
Private adoption can be very expensive. It is important to understand how you will pay for adoption. In many ways it will guide some of your decisions, at least it did for us. We were not willing to go into debt to pay for adoption so we had to figure out how we would cash flow the adoption process.
There are many ways to pay for an adoption:
-Grants
-Fundraising
-Loans
-Savings from current income
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Some may decide to sell something like a car or house to fund their adoption. There is also the Adoption Tax Credit that can help with costs too (please discuss with your tax advisor on how this would impact your tax filing).
The point is, there are many ways to pay for the adoption but you must know what financial burden you are willing to accept from the beginning. This will help you plan and identify what adoption professionals you work with. Adoption costs can reach into the fifty thousand dollar mark so you need to be prepared financially from the start. Additionally I believe being financially prepared from the beginning will make for a smoother adoption and prevent a lot of future anxiety.
Tomorrow we will discuss Step 2