January 16th, 2008 - Changing those financial goals, or We’re having a baby!
Contrary to all expectations otherwise*, we have decided to have another baby! (*I detested maternity leave. Despite decades of desire to have 5+ children and settling for 2, I switched to being happy with just one because I absolutely did not want another infant. I have continued to feel the same except for short periods of time when I thought it might not be so bad. I was so convinced that we gave away our infant car seat and most infant clothing. Subsequently, we’ve saved clothes for foster care, but I have less than one box of baby clothes. Guess I have an excuse for garage-saling this summer now!) We started talking about it and decided we both actually want to have more kids, now!
The plan is to start the homestudy in April-ish. Oh, yeah, for those who don’t know which is most of you except family, we adopt. We plan to use the same agency, Community Adoption Center out of Manitowoc. Our social worker still works there (according to the website) and we can’t imagine working with anyone else. We really loved her. Just hoping their fees haven’t risen dramatically in the last 3 years. If it goes like last time, it will take about 2 months to complete the homestudy then we enter the pool of waiting families. Then, it can any amount of time at all to be chosen and anywhere from no time at all (baby already born) to 4 months or so (if the birthmother is only 5 months pregnant, the earliest they tend to match families). Generally speaking, most people have a baby within a year but it can take 2 years or more.
Changing financial plans:
Domestic infant adoption costs around $15,000-$25,000. That includes things like agency fees, homestudy fee, paperwork (things like copies of birth and marriage certificates), travel (Manitowoc is 90 miles away and we have to go there at least 3 times, plus the birth family is unlikely to be from Oshkosh), resume fee (our agency calls your materials a resume, others call it the birthparent letter or have a book or portfolio or such. Our agency charges a yearly fee to be in their files to discourage people from putting there materials in at dozens of different agencies I suppose.), birthfamily expenses (you can choose to pay some or all expenses such as rent, medical, transportation, etc. In WI, there are limits on one of them–I think it’s $1500 for living expenses or is it medical?), counseling, and all sorts of other stuff.
We still intend to pay off the HEL this year, but the timeline will be accelerated, with payoff in July or sooner. We’ve already decided that we just aren’t ever going to get to doing the electrical work so are putting that $3000 towards the loan, which pushes us 3 months closer to paying it off.
We will NOT (unless something dire happens) decrease our retirement or charitable giving, as we are very proud of the amounts we are able to put towards those this year. We are not, however, going to go above 16% to retirement, although I had initially been hoping for that. We are going to decrease travel savings (essentially, we’re going on the 2-week vacation for the wedding in April then nothing else. We’d thought we might do another 4-day trip to NJ in the fall.) and Fund for the House (the same place the electric money comes out of). We will still pay off the car loan on time but do not intend to use that money towards the adoption as our car could still have a major necessarily repair and we need to save for it.
Instead of putting the money that’s been going to the HEL in other areas (primarily, paying off the 1st mortgage) we will instead pay for/save for the adoption. Depending on how things go, we may end up with a third second mortgage. (We keep paying it off and getting a new one within a year.) BUT, we know that we can pay it off within 2 years giving the current amount we pay on the HEL. In addition, we expect that I will continue to teach at least one course a year plus there may be other income additions (and hopefully a couple raises during that time). And hey, the IRS gives us a $1000 tax credit for each kid each year!
The federal government also has an adoption tax credit that we will be able to take advantage of. It goes up each year and is currently just over $11000. That means that over a number of years, we will get a tax credit–not a deduction but an actual credit–of about half of the money we will spend on the adoption. However, you can’t count on it paying the money because you can only take it after you’ve spent the money. You do not get paid any more money than the amount of the tax you had due, so it can take many years to get the full credit. With Maggie, we took the credit over 3-4 years.
You often hear that adoption is no more expensive than giving birth. That’s only true if you have no health insurance and pay completely out of pocket. And have complications. If I gave birth, almost 100% of my medical costs would be covered. Adoption is a huge financial commitment. There are ways to reduce the costs. For instance, adopting from foster care costs nearly nothing, But in our case, we do with to adopt an infant and they are generally not available via foster care (in our neck of the woods) and there are a host of other issues I won’t go into. We have also ended up with a for-profit agency. We didn’t realize this when we chose them, but there aren’t many in our area. We had tried two others first and left them for various reasons. One other turned us down (one did only a few adoptions a year and we didn’t fit their primary profile and another was Evangelical Christian and would have if we had contacted them). But we are happy with the way our agency worked and don’t care to find something cheaper. Our costs would also be less if we had chosen to adopt again immediately, as just updates would have been done to many of our original materials.
I do not plan to make this into an adoption blog, but certainly aspects will be relevant and for heaven’s sake, this is about my life and that will be a big part of it. As with our prior adoption, I am happy to talk about the stuff we do but I will not tell my child’s story. Once we go into the pool, I won’t give any updates. Everyone will find out we have a new kid when we have a new kid. (This is also because having to tell people you don’t have a child after telling everyone you were having a child is heartbreaking. We did that once. It sucked 6 months later when people asked about our daughter. And we didn’t have one.) If any of you readers wonder about domestic infant adoption and open adoption, I’m happy to answer questions and tell you what the various options and types of openness are and how the process works. But I do not reveal details of our specific situation(s). When she’s older, you can ask Maggie and she’ll tell you if she wants to! :) (Even our parents and siblings don’t know, so don’t feel bad.)
Some people think of this as announcing they are pregnant. I feel that will be more like when we enter the pool of waiting families. Either way, we are excited and delighted to expand our family and hope you are, too!
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