I need some good ole fashioned advice!

"Adoption Credit Card" - Oh - instead of air miles we could get dollars to pay off adoptions? If you ever find that, I am IN! :)I would save 30k for the first child and 15k for the second, 10k for the third if you're adopting more than one. If you can pad that a little, all the better, because you are pretty likely to need to invest tidy sums at the dentist, the optometrist, and the ND when you get home!A thought that sprang from your credit card idea though - be sure to have an air-mile credit card with miles that don't expire soon, use it for everything, and bank those miles. We have a Southwest card and those miles paid for a lot of our national flights. If you could get a card for a carrier that flies internationally - great!

Good luck with savings the additional money. I think it is hard for them to tell you the total amount outside of their fees because everyone is different in the types of personal expenses they will have. Having the agency fees saved upfront is a good way to start. Then start savings either hotel loyalty points or airline points. Family can donate miles and points as well and I found it easier to ask for these instead of money. We used free tickets for our first visit and free tickets for our roundtrip tickets which meant our return flight was VERY flexible - no change fees. We bought an adoption special ticket for our daughter to fly home. We also received donated hotel points from family so that we could stay free a few nights in Warsaw. And as someone pointed out, your expenses won't stop when you get home - so have other expense reduction plans in place like - grandparents lined up to be babysitters, a complete understanding of your medical insurance, etc. Then - if you still need to save money reduce your expenses while in Poland - get some thick skin and ride in 2nd class on the train instead of first, eat at local cafes instead of upscale restaurants (no english menus for example), go grocery shopping and make meals at the apartment (chicken soup is just as cheap over there as it is here), take buses instead of cabs while in Warsaw, etc. They (the people involved in the adoption process in Poland) tend to think that all Americans have money and it is your responsibility to spend it with them. Instead of blindly going along and shelling out money - ask what the expenses will be, what each step will cost, research costs of apartments to ensure you are at least at market rate, etc.

As I was reading the suggestions, another thought crossed my mind - house swapping. If you're not familiar with it, you arrange with another family to switch homes for the time you'd be traveling and staying in Poland with a Polish family who'd like to travel to your area of the States. You both save on boarding this way, and you'd have all the at-home commodities (ok, maybe not all, depending on the family whose home you'd be staying in, as stand-up showers are not standard everywhere, for instance, lol) while there. There's certainly a degree of trust and sense of adventure you'd need, but I hear it's the newest thing in travel. I haven't done it myself, but if I didn't already have family over there, I'd be inclined to look into it. Although we live in the suburbs, so not sure how enticing our location would be for any prospective swappers. Just something to look into. And absolutely get a flight mileage credit card. We got ours a few months ago, and we already have enough points for one round trip cross-Atlantic flight! (Our card also allows us to redeem points for certain hotels, so if house swapping is not for you, you can go with the points for most of your travel expenses. And I'd second the idea of not going with all the top-notch day to day stuff (choice of transportation, restaurant, etc.) It'll save you a bunch to do some research ahead of time so you can order a meal w/o an English menu, or figure out the bus/trolley route. My experience with taxi drivers in Poland has been less than stellar. I was charged extra for having suitcases when we took a cab from the airport to the hotel. And you have no idea if he's not taking the "scenic" route to a destination right around the corner just to get more money out of you. But maybe that's just me...;) And one final note, bc I too was extremely conservative with our adoption budget and had it saved up ahead of time (for a domestic adoption). We ended up spending half of our budget on 4 fall-throughs, but we got most of it back via the adoption tax credit. Then someone pointed out that we finance our cars, homes, education - why not adoption? Isn't having a child so much more important than any of these things? So if you have a mortgage, student loans, and/or a car payment, consider biting the bullet and financing whatever portion of your adoption that you can't save for up front. When I started to look at it like this, a whole new world of adoption options opened up to me.

Costs are variable for reasons that have little to do with the adoption itself. As an example, you will need to make one or more trips -- some regions of Russia are now requiring three to four trips -- to the foreign country, and you won't be able to choose when you travel or get a lot of notice before travel; you may not be able to use frequent flyer miles. As a result, you could wind up traveling at peak season, when airfares and hotel rooms are sky high in price, or at an off season, when you can get some great discounts. The difference can often be thousands of dollars, if you have two people going halfway around the world even once, let alone 2-4 times. Even when it comes to adoption fees, there's variability. Homestudies in some parts of the U.S. cost way more than homestudies in other parts of the country, for example. The reason has to do with the cost of living, which affects what an agency needs to pay its social workers. It may also have to do with the number of available social workers and the distance that they will have to travel to meet with you. Dossier preparation involves fees paid to states and others for documents that you need, and for their authentication or apostille. Some states charge more than others. And some countries require more documents than others. In addition, your situation may or may not require certain documents. As an example, if you have never been divorced, you will not need copies of divorce decrees, and authentication of those decrees; if you have one divorce per spouse, that document and its authentication could cost you $50 or more. If an adoption takes a long time, your homestudy will need at least one update during the process, and you will also need to renew your USCIS approval and get re-fingerprinted at least once. These costs could range as high as $1,000. Overall, I'd say that the "average" adoption costs close to $30,000, these days, and that adoption from Russia will cost significantly more -- say $45,000. To keep costs down, select a one-trip country, if you qualify, and consider countries that allow one spouse, instead of both, to travel; you can also consider countries that allow you to pay an escort. Sharon

With Poland there is the bonding period, and since you don't know what city you will be in or what time of year, it's hard to know how much lodging and food and such will cost. Also you don't always know for sure what the judges will require. Our judge not only required a full three weeks for bonding, he required that I stay during the the waiting period after. So I had to pay for an apartment for my son and I for the additional three weeks.

While I certainly agree that from the parents' perspective, extended bonding stays in-country with the child may seem like a negative, in essence, I see this as in the best interest of the child. Poland's required bonding time both prior to court and again prior to emigrating is one of the positive things about adopting from Poland, I think. The child doesn't know you from Adam, so on the first trip, you get to meet and spend several days together before making a committment. Then (depending on the child's age), the child has some time to get used to the idea of you-the-new-parents returning for him or her in a few months, and can use this time to mentally prepare to leave his or her friends, orphanage, neighborhood, school, country, everything. The second trip allows the child to get reaquainted with the new parents and spend family time outside the orphanage with them and slowly start to get to know them, start picking up some English, and start forming an attachment to the people who will take her away from her native country. And even after court, the child has time to say their final goodbyes and look forward to starting their new life with their new family in their new country. I think from an attachment, transition, and immigration perspective, the required bonding that Poland requires is one of the best examples of child-centered international adoption I've come across. The idea of sending an escort to "deliver" the child as if she were some sort of mail-order item is repulsive to me. Believe me, I know all too well about budgetary constraints. But my finances cannot take precedence over the best interest of the child. Maybe with a very young child, a system with less travel and in-country time is fine, but not with a preschooler or older. I say this from two personal perspectives. One is from having to make peace with transitioning my foster daughter back to her mom. I've struggled over my grief-guilt paradox - after all, it's a happy ending for Baby V and her mother that they end up together. It's selfishness that cries out that I want to keep her to myself. If I love her as much as I say I do, her best interest has to take precedence, and I've tried to act accordingly. Two, I emigrated at the age of 8. I came with my mother, so I wasn't going into the total unknown, but I did have to leave my entire extended family, all of my friends, my neighborhood, my school, my culture, my country. I can't imagine having to get on a plane with a mother I didn't spend 8 years bonding with first. So the few weeks that Poland requires for newly adopted kids to bond with their new parents I think is the least that we can do to help ease that transition for them. Don't mean to hijack the thread, just wanted to put a positive spin on the required bonding time, so it doesn't seem like a useless, bureaucratic time and money drain. :yoda:

I agree that the bonding time was a good thing for my son. I was just pointing out that since the judge sets the amount of time for the bonding period and can declare that you don't go home after. (I was in Poland for a little more than six weeks) it can mean you have to have more money saved. (or plan to go into credit card debt as we did, LOL) It was good for my son and I am glad I had that time in his home country. We just had not been prepared for the possibility of one trip being six weeks when we started the process so financially we could have been better prepared. There was also the issue of time off work for my husband.