Q&A Session #2: Expenses Part 1 of 3

No new news here. The online profiles are both up. I have the hard copy of the printed version as does our caseworker. She said she would call me this week to talk about how it will all works from here until we are chosen, but hasn't yet. Things seem to move slower out in California. I was giving her until today and then I will give her a call. They are 2 hours behind, so I will make the call this afternoon and see what is going on.
With nothing new to report, I thought I would have a second Q&A session - How much does this all cost??

Sorry, but I don't think it is proper to post the actual dollar value online. I suppose a highly motivated person could just google the company or a similar company and find it out themselves. Instead I will go into how the money is spent, because that is interesting.

Our agency breaks it into 3 phases.

PHASE 1:
This is where we are now. This begins the moment we sign the contract and ends when we are chosen and agree to the match. This is also the biggest chunk of money at one time (well, actually it is split into 3 payments over 90 days). The money in this phase is guaranteed to the agency, so even if we put our account on hold or decide to not adopt, we still owe them the whole amount for the phase. The money spent here covers the cost of advertising for a birthmother and helps support their network of social workers for both birthmothers and adoptive parents. The way it was explained to us is that the amount we pay isn't to cover our costs specifically, but instead they figured out a while ago what their bottomline is (and I'm sure how much money they want to profit on top of that although they didn't say that) and divided it up amongst how many clients they generally have. This way the cost is less, supposedly, for everyone.

In this phase we were assigned our caseworker, made our profile, answered a million questions, and did the 2 online profiles. In addition to the money we paid the agency for this phase we also had to spend additional money for other necessary items.

First was the profile itself. While I wrote the text and gathered pictures, we hired the graphic designer to put it all together.). This is an option that for some reason most people do not take. I understnad it is an extra expense, but this is the most important part and in the end is just a drop in the bucket. We also had to pay to have it printed. We could have printed it ourselves on crappy paper, but with this being the most important part it really didn't seem worth it in the end, so professional quality it was with a professional price tag.

Second was the homestudy. We had to get a local agency to do this for us. They of course had a fee for themselves and since we live in the middle of nowehere we had to pay mileage for her to come to the house (which was annoying since we didn't have a choice - she had to come to the house for the site visit). On top of their fee we also had to get fingerprinted (twice since the first time ended up not being the correct way, so we had to redo it) and do the online classes.

Apparently, our main agency figures in the cost of the homestudy and printing into the big picture amount they quoted us the entire project will cost. I don't think they plan for the graphic designer. I can tell you that our homestudy agency was more expensive then they qouted us and I don't think they added in the extra money for fingerprinting and online classes, so basically we are already over budget for phase 1.

Up next....Phase 2 :)