To Adopters: what were your costs to adopt a child? (birth, options)

[Mrs.Bewitched]

I know they range, but I would like to know what it cost for you to adopt your child and from what country/state.

Thanks!

[brokencrayola]

It took us over 5 years to adopt. In that 5 years we had 5 homestudies ($600-$800 each), a few failed adoptions where we lost money, money spent to advertise in newspapers just a little, make adoption business card, make a webpage (did that ourslef but there were some costs), some travel, fees to sign up with 2 agencies (ended up dropping both after about a yr. each), phone bills etc. etc. Before we even adopted we had spent/lost $12,000-$15,000. Our daughters adoption cost us about $5,000 total. That was travel, motel and food, and legal costs. It ended up we connected with a birthmother on our own and did a private adoption. So when it was all said and done it was about 5+ years and $17,000-$20,000 and that was 5 years ago, costs are higher now.

[Sampaguita]

Have you looked at adoption.org? They have a message board and you can probably get a lot of feedback there. The forums are broken down into several categories: domestic and then by state/city and also international by country/regions.

[ahava]

You probably want to adopt a baby, but we adopted our daughter from foster care and our costs were under $2,000 and most of it was buying necessities (clothing, toiletries, etc) for her. The state paid for our homestudy and our legal fees. Adopting from foster care was the perfect option for us because we didn't want to adopt a baby and we didn't want to wait years to start our family. It was about five months from the day we called DCFS to the day our daughter came to live with us.

[Drouzin]

This may be a bit off topic, but I just wanted to mention to anyone adopting a child, to try and get as much of his/her family medical history as possible. Hubby is adopted and we have run into a few medical problems with both him and our son. There were a few times we wished that we had some idea of what could be going on and a family medical history would have definately helped.

[brokencrayola]

Originally Posted by Drouzin

This may be a bit off topic, but I just wanted to mention to anyone adopting a child, to try and get as much of his/her family medical history as possible. Hubby is adopted and we have run into a few medical problems with both him and our son. There were a few times we wished that we had some idea of what could be going on and a family medical history would have definately helped.

You make a good point, however that is not always as easy as it sounds. I am in contact with our daughters birthmother but she has no idea about the background of the father as it was a very crief relationship. Even her own medical background has been vague. I specifically asked for this at the time of our daughters birth. I knew the birthmom and her son (by a different father) had allergies (pets, plants etc.) and the boy has asthma. That was all I was told. After my daughter had a reaction to her second time on penecillin I called her birthmother and asked if she knew of any allergies like this. She casually says, oh yeah I am allergic to penecillin. Gosh that would have been nice to know being as I live an hour from the closest hospital and she had whelts on her from her head to her toes. My point is that please do get all the info you can, it just isn't always as easy as it should be.

[mommyto4princesses]

All your answers there..along with our story of a FREE ADOPTION!