Last night I wrote a blog entry about how much it cost to adopt Little J and how we managed to come up with the money. I know that it many circumstances, primarily when people are adopting from foster care, that adoption costs nothing. But in many other circumstances - international, private agencies, etc. - adoption costs a pretty penny.

In our case we were willing to pay a lot of money to have a seamless experience. I wrote about this in the "our story" section but before we looked into adoption I'd had five miscarriages over about a 2-year period (the last one at 18 weeks) and we weren't mentally prepared to do foster-to-adopt. I have several friends who have done this and in most of those cases things have been fine...after a while. But we weren't prepared to have a placement fall through or have to wait 2-3 years for the adoption to occur. We wanted a child NOW!

Anyway, I've done a little research into how people manage to pay for an expensive adoption. Here are a few ideas.

• Be rich to begin with. I'm not kidding. That will make everything a little easier for you!




• Get a second job, or, if one parent is at home, that person could get a job. This is basically what we did and it worked wonderfully.




• Use your savings. This is also what we did. In our case it was money I was saving up for Big J's college fund...and now he doesn't have one anymore...but heck, he has a brother instead!




• Flip a house. We didn't do this to pay for our adoption but we have done this since and I think if you had a couple of years and you were in the right real estate market that this would be a great way to make some money. Actually, you'd probably have to flip a couple of houses to do this but if you are handy and have enough money/equity to handle the down payment it might be a good strategy.




• Don't forget about the adoption tax credit. This really, really helped us the year that we adopted. There's a great article about this here.




• Hold fundraisers. I've heard of some people who've had success petitioning their church or other charitable organizations for help with a fundraiser. I know one family who had a garage sale, but I don't know how far that went towards their adoption considering the most I've ever made in a garage sale was $375.




• 
  Start a business in your spare time that's devoted to raising money for the adoption. I guess this is the same as getting a second job but I was thinking something along the lines of an ebay business. If it's possible to make a living selling stuff on ebay then it stands to reason that you could earn $10,000 that way. Same goes for selling cosmetics or kitchen stuff or whatever.




• Save, save, save. Quit eating out, quit buying new clothes. Maybe trade in your expensive vehicle for a less-expensive one. Save.




• Many employers (not one I've ever been associated with, but I understand they're out there) offer adoption benefits.

Any other ideas out there?