Money is tight for everyone, these days. What are some creative ways you saved/are saving for your adoption?

If you’re in need of fundraising, then you can utilize Just Love Coffee Roasters Fundraising program. You host your own customizable store that sells coffee and a few other items. You receive $5 per bag of coffee and t-shirt, $3 per tote bag, hat & travel mug, and $1 per coffee scoop. The cool thing about it is that you don’t have to buy and resell anything or even fulfill the orders. Just Love Coffee Roasters handles all of the orders. You can login to your user and see how much you’ve sold on your store and you receive a check every month. All you have to do is advertise your unique URL that you assigned to your store. They even have programs for pre-adoption, post adoption, and if you adopt a special needs child then you can keep your store open indefinitely. Go to http://www.justlovecoffee.com to check it out.

Money is the single biggest obstacle to adoption for my husband and me. We are both employed, and just bought our first house in June, but our savings is non-existent.

If you have adopted, or have the money ready to adopt, can you please share how you got it? We’re just a regular couple paying the bills and seeing a movie every now and then. I’m worried that you have to be rich to adopt - I don’t know anyone else with $25,000 sitting around. Please help shed some light on this if you can tell your story, whether it was independent wealth, generous family or friends, grants or other assistance, a creative business idea, or saving for years…I’d love to know.

The money aspect is so discouraging it makes it hard to know how to begin. I need to know it’s possible! 

Initial amounts (homestudy, etc) we’ll be able to do without hitting savings and stuff too hard.  For larger amounts, like after placement, or at placement…probably a frantic begging of money at some level to family/friends.  I’d like to keep home equity line and credit cards out of it as much as possible, but last resort, they’re there.  And that is one debt I won’t be bitter about

Check out http://www.adoptionbug.com

We chose to take out a loan.  We considered the fundraising route but we decided that it was our choice to adopt and didn’t feel as though our friends would be willing to help finance our choice.  There are many banks out there that offer good loans at low interest rates for such purposes.

I just posted an article that discusses a toolkit that can help you present the idea of adoption benefits to your employer.  It’s from the Dave Thomas Foundation from Adoption. 

We used the toolkit to make a presentation to my husband’s employer in 2008 when we were going through our adoption.  Benefits were not approved at that time but at least we tried, and it may help other families in the future.  It also gave me something productive to do during the waiting time of the adoption process!

You can see the article with a link to the toolkit at: http://www.examiner.com/x-33152-Lansing-Adoptive-Families-Examiner

Rhonda

Thanks so much JoyofAdoption,

I read most of your articles from the Lansing Adoptive Families Examiner and many were very helpful. My husband and I are in the very beginning stages of adoption, trying to decide on an agency and trying to figure out how in the world we can afford this. We would like to adopt from an orphanage in Mexico. It already seems very overwhelming and frustrating and I thought starting was the easy part and the paperwork and waiting was the difficult part. Really hope to get everything started this week, we will see. Thanks again for posting and for all your articles. I really hope things will not continue to be difficult.

Sincerely,
JRForeman (Julie)