Our Home Study Application is Almost Complete!
We’re really excited to get moving on this adoption process, but at the same time, we want to be sure we’re ready to go and committed to all this entails. By the way, this post is about the process so far and the costs. We’ve been asked by quite few people to ‘please tell them what we’ve learned so far.’ So, here goes!
We’ve Been Doing a Lot of Research on…
…what we’ll need to do to get ready for our home study. Some of these things include getting physicals establishing our health, checking out all the fire safety/carbon monoxide equipment in the home and replacing anything that’s out of date or non-existent. We’re going to need to make sure that we have all necessary official documentation for each member of the family that states we really are who we say we are! We need to peruse the IDPH Recall list to be sure that none of our children’s items are on that list. We need to sign up to have a landline at our residence and buy a wired phone! We’ll probably need to do CPR classes and other necessary training. We need to get a certificate of inoculation for our cat. We need to double check that all toxic household supplies, batteries, dangerous tools and medication is in a ‘safe place.’ We even need to have a written Fire Safety Evacuation Plan.
There’s so much to do and I don’t know, do we do it before the home study or wait until our social worker asks for these things? But we should probably just turn in the Application for Services with our home study agency as our first step. This leads to another question.
How/When Do We Finance this Momentous Event?
Options include: 1) Pay for it all ourselves, somehow. 2) Pay for it ourselves along with the help of grants or scholarships. 3) Pay for it ourselves along with grants/scholarships and fundraising or donations. We’d like to do the third option. I’d like to trust that God will provide all the funding we need somehow and in someway. I’m sure He will, but the path to that is unknown. As we’re getting ready to send in our application, we’ll have to pay a non-refundable application fee of $300 and then before the completion of the home study, another $2,150.
When Is the Responsible and Ethical Time to Begin Fundraising for an Adoption?
Do we start raising funds before or after an approved home study? We want to be sure that as soon as we get this ‘ball rolling’ we’ll be on our way to having the entire adoption funded through to finalization. But, that might not be a surety we can have ahead of time. God does seem to call us to take one step at a time, after all. In doing our research, we found that a typical Domestic Private Adoption has about 3 different payment ranges. If we go through an adoption agency we could be looking at as much as $30,000. This would give us access to the most birth mothers. If we go with an adoption attorney or a smaller agency, we’re looking at about $15,000-$16,000, but fewer birth moms will see our adoption profile. These costs seem so high! Yet there is one more option. We can find the birth mother ourselves or through our networks. This would cost around $10,000.
For Those Who’ve Adopted and Fundraised…
How do we know what number to shoot for? How do we know when we should ask for donations? (For not-yet-adopters. Most grants/scholarships require a placement or signed agreement with the birth mother before you can apply for them.)
Brittany M Putman 