Your Adoption Budget

We hope that you’ve been able to learn about some helpful tasks and tips that you can do during your adoption wait in Lifetime Adoption’s blog series “Before You Adopt.”

During your adoption wait, you might experience a range of emotions, from excitement to worry. Adoption is one of those unpredictable things: adoptions don’t occur usually happen in an organized, scheduled way.

This causes many adoptive couples to feel like they have little to no control over what happens during their wait.  But know you do have control: you can control the actions you’re taking to get ready for your adoption match. 

In this installment of Lifetime’s “Before You Adopt” series, we’re sharing about another activity that you can do before you adopt – budgeting and saving for adoption. Read on to learn about a money-saving activity you can be doing to raise the needed funds for your adoption match, adoption travel, and other fees.

Some people raise money before they even start the adoption process, then jump into adoption trusting that the funds they’ve raised are enough (or that there will be time later to raise more, save more, or find more), or continuously work on saving for adoption.
 
Lifetime encourages adoptive families to continue growing adoption funds throughout your journey. That might mean saving up, cutting out extras like a daily latte fix, applying for adoption grants, fundraising, or selling items you have. Sometimes, an adoptive mom who’s a homemaker will start a temporary job. Or, one spouse takes on a second, part-time job. The money from that job then goes straight into their adoption fund.

Shares one adoptive parent, “I worked a lot during our adoption wait. It really helped me with my anxiety that we’d never get picked by a birth mother. My job was one of the only places where I didn’t think about and obsess over our adoption process! Plus, having the extra money sure helped us when we had a long hotel stay after our son was born.” 

It’s smart to keep building your adoption fund because you’ll want to have enough money to cover expenses as they pop up. Examples are adoption travel, legal fees, and helping your birth mom with expenses. There are lots of reasons why having extra funds are beneficial in your adoption. Mainly, it’s because no matter your adoption path, you need to expect the unexpected. (Which is a good lesson for parenting too!)
 
If you’re lucky enough to build your adoption budget and then end up not needing it, you can use your savings for other expenses, such as traveling to visit friends and family, or starting a college fund.