Back in March 2013, I wrote about the financial side of our decision to adopt. Now, almost 20 months later, I’m here to write about the financial side of our actual adoption and where we go from here.

Our daughter has been with us for 6 months now, and we will be finalizing the adoption in November. We are very excited.

We are adopting from foster care, having gone through an agency. If you read the previous article, you will know that our agency costs were $5,000. In addition, we have to pay lawyer fees for the adoption. In our case, those are around $1,025. That is a total cost of $6,025 for the adoption.

Our daughter was placed with us right as I was getting laid off from my prior job, and my new one does not have adoption fee reimbursement, so it would seem that the whole amount would be on us. But, it is not.

Because we are adopting an older child, we qualify for adoption assistance. The state will reimburse us up to $1,500 in legal fees and agency fees toward the adoption. That takes our costs down to $4,525.

Now, because we were foster parents, the state sent us a stipend each month toward caring for our daughter and reimbursed some transportation costs for things they asked us to do (like keep her in her old school to finish out the last school year, even though we lived in a different county). We were financially prepared to take on a child and would have kept her in the other school anyway, for continuity purposes, so the money we got from the state for that I consider extra that can be put toward adoption costs.

We will have received around $3,400 in stipend and $1,300 in mileage reimbursement by the time we adopt, meaning that $4,525 is covered, with about $175 to spare. (Which all went toward buying us season passes to the water park.)

So, by adopting through foster care, and by being prepared to absorb a child into our budget, our adoption will essentially be free.