It’s an Emotional Decision First: The choice to bring a child in to your life, including the when and how, is primarily an emotional decision. Most people will tell you, there is no such thing as the perfect time to have a child. You just have to decide that’s what you want and go for it.

C and I are no exceptions to this. We have been talking about kids since we were dating. (We have been married 8.5 years, together for over 12.) Up until this year, my emotional desire to have children has not been strong enough to overcome everything else in our lives. This year it is, hence, our journey in to adoption.

This post is not about the emotional decision. Even if I could find words to describe everything that has gone in to that, I am not certain the train of thought would be coherent to anyone else. The “kid decision”, including the method by which you are bringing a child in to your life, is just too personalized.

This post is, instead, about the financial implications of our decision to adopt. Because like it or not, the decision to bring a child in to your life is a financial decision, even if finances should not be the primary factor. And with the decision to adopt, finances take a prominent spot early on.

You Can’t Ignore the Money: Let’s start with the obvious. Adoption costs money. If you have even half way decent health insurance, it costs considerably more than giving birth. When we first started talking about adoption a few years ago, the upfront cost was actually C’s biggest argument against it.

Considering I work for a healthcare organization, my coverage is really good. It has been a while since I have done the math, but I think we came out with a total of around $500 out of pocket in medical costs if we had a normal pregnancy and delivery. Compare that to our friends who adopted a baby from a family member at a cost of over $20,000. The decision to adopt had to be something we were financially prepared for.

International Adoption: I did research- lots of research. I started with looking at international adoptions. After all, you hear so much about how expensive it is to adopt here in the US, and there are so many international adoptions, I thought maybe it was cheaper. It is not.

Adopting from China was by far the least expensive of the international options, but C and I wouldn’t have been able to do that because we are both overweight. China has started to feel like it is losing too many of its girls to foreign nations and put major restrictions on who can adopt and who can not. One of those restrictions is that they won’t adopt to obese people.

But even so, not only were international adoptions, even in China, on par with, or more expensive than domestic adoptions to begin with, you also have to be prepared to go to the child’s country of origin and spend 2 weeks to 6 months there getting all your paperwork and clearances taken care of. I did not run the math on that. Even on the short end, with plane tickets and hotel costs, that raised the cost of international adoption by a few thousand dollars.

And none of this even takes into account the fact that in some places, you can’t honestly be certain the child’s family intended for them to be adopted out.

International adoption was not the route for us.

Foster to Adopt: Have you seen the adoption commercials? Maybe if you’re not in the situation we’re in, you don’t even notice them, but they’re the ones with the tag line that goes something like “You don’t have to be the perfect person to be the perfect parent. There are thousands of kids and teens in foster care waiting for families.” The commercials also mention a website AdoptUSKids.org.

You may find this a terrible analogy, but I’m a pet person, so you’ll have to deal with it. Have you ever spent any time on petfinder.com? You can spend hours searching for your perfect pet, no matter where in the country they are. AdoptUSKids is like petfinder for foster children. It is both scary and amazing and sad and addicting.

AdoptUSKids was actually too much for me. I focused on the Northwest Adoption Exchange website because it had a much smaller number of kids on it, and was less overwhelming.

You see, what I found out when researching adoption was that if we adopted from foster care, our costs would run only a few thousand dollars, and since my company reimburses up to $2,000 in adoption costs, it could be virtually free, or at least no more expensive than giving birth.

In 2010, C and I went to the state sponsored foster parent orientation and then took the required 27 hours worth of PRIDE training to become foster parents. And then we stopped. Once you are a foster parent in the state’s system, their primary goal is to find a home (be it temporary or permanent) for children. Even if you’re listed as a foster to adopt family and they don’t know if the child will become available for adoption, they might call you anyway, because they need a bed.

That makes sense. The job of the state social workers is to find a safe place for the child. That child, not your family as a whole, is their biggest concern. That is as it should be.

But we have a hard time saying no to dogs in a shelter. We did not know that we could emotionally handle having social workers call us and needing to say no to a child because it wasn’t the child for us. Can you say Guilt?

So, we stopped the process. Foster to adopt, “free”, directly through the state, was not the route for us.

Agency Adoption: We stopped the process for almost two years. C had been out of work since May 2009, and we were getting our financial house in order. We could not afford to adopt, and the emotional desire was not strong enough to override that.

Honestly, we are still probably not in the “ideal” financial state to adopt, but now, the emotional desire is strong enough. When I decided in January of this year that this was what I really wanted, I went back to the research.

I researched different agencies in our local area. For places that don’t list their fees on their websites, I sent emails asking for them. The least expensive seemed to be around $25,000, not counting lawyer’s fees.

And then I came across Amara. Amara is a local agency that does both foster to adopt and infant relinquishments. They also have a sliding scale for fees based on your last 3 years tax returns. Their fee schedule tops out at $25,000 (plus lawyer’s fees) instead of starting there. Based on our income, our agency fees would be $5,000 if we went the foster to adopt route, or around $15,000 if we adopt a relinquished infant.

Truth is, I looked at Amara during my first round of research, but since they charged $5,000 for adopting from foster care, when it was “free” via the state, I’d discounted them.

Our Decision: We are adopting through Amara. The agency asks that we be open to both foster to adopt and infant relinquishment as options. Since we would have our own social worker, someone whose job it is to consider what is best for our whole family, between ourselves and the social workers at the state, we are comfortable with that.

Because we do not pay all the money at once, we are able to manage the costs along with all of our other goals. The process also moves slowly, giving us time to build up extra savings.

If we adopt from foster care, the $5,000 we need will be barely a hiccup in our finances. It will mean we reduce our two quarters worth of tuition cushion that we have for C’s schooling to one quarter, but beyond that, it will not have a significant impact. (Please note, I am only talking about adoption fees here, not the costs of then taking care of the child. That is figured in to a different part of my budget.) In fact, we have already paid $1,800 of that, which came out of our unexpected tax refund, and had no impact on our savings at all.

If we are chosen by a birth mother for infant relinquishment, it will be a bit trickier. But we could always get student loans for C’s college courses at 6.8% APR (that’s what the unsubsidized loans are at now), or even put the full cost on our 6.9% APR credit card. The plus of the student loans is that the interest is deductible, and we do not have to pay on them while he is still in school (though we would.) The plus of the credit card is that we do not have to take out the loans early in order to have the money- we would not take on any new debt until the last possible moment.

I have not mentioned legal fees here. We will have to pay for our own adoption attorney if we do infant relinquishment. However, because we are going through an agency, those costs are lower (the lawyer doesn’t have to do the home study, etc.). In addition, we have a number of friends who are lawyers, including ones who are self-employed, who would do this for us for a greatly reduced fee in order to get the experience. That is a risk we are willing to take going through an agency that we would not be willing to take on a private adoption.

Worth Every Penny: Either way, we are now at a point in our lives where this is the right emotional decision for us, and one we can plan for financially without risk of putting ourselves in financial jeopardy. Yes, we may take on some more debt, but I’m pretty certain that when we hold our child, we’ll think to ourselves “We would have paid 100 times as much for this experience.”