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My husband and I are 29 & 26, respectively. We recently applied to adopt. We have owned a home, but sold it last month due to a career move, which means we have a large amount of extra money each month due to not having a $1600/month mortgage anymore and renting a $400/month place instead! However, this means our assets are pretty much nothing, and our debt to income ratio isn't great (about $70k in debt, due to our combined student loans and our cars). The wait time for approval has passed and we haven't heard anything (no questions either, though). My question is, if we can clearly demonstrate our financial ok-ness, and our *extremely* good credit scores...should I be as worried as I am over our lack of net worth if the qualifications in the application didn't mention a net worth requirement? It's frustrating since we did own a home, but needed to sell to relocate for my job! We're also a bit worried about a misdemeanor my husband had 9 years ago for being at a college party and being caught holding (though not drinking) a beer at age 20. We disclosed everything and now I'm all kinds of worried we are in the "probably no" pile and that's why we haven't heard anything!Anybody have any experience with this type of initial application worry? On a scale of 1 to 10 how reasonable are my fears? We have dealt with infertility for two years and feel adoption is the way we want to build our family.
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Oh definitely! We have a bunch of money allocated to paying down debt and potentially paying for adoption in our budget spreadsheet, so that's definitely the plan. We're ok waiting to buy another house for a while. :) I may call, I just don't want to look too impatient since I know there are lots of limbo waiting periods beyond this if they approve us!
Just wondering if you've heard anything on your approval status? My husband and I are in pretty much the same boat with finances. We are trying to stockpile money and also buy a house soon to look better on paper. Also, are you awaiting approval from the homestudy agency? Thanks - good luck!
We were denied. According to our adoption agency contact, the Ethiopian government requires a positive net worth. Even though we sold our home to eliminate that huge debt, we were still negative because while our personal worth is about 12,000 (not much), our student loans and various other debts (cars, some credit card debt though the vast majority of our debt is school-related, and being young means we haven't paid down as much as older people have, simply due to time) pushed us to about 62k in debt. The worth of our cars is not much since they aren't new (about 3k in worth). We were told we could re-apply when our net worth is positive, but that we would probably not be approved by a social worker until that happened home-study-wise. We were waiting approval from an adoption agency.I would think hard about buying a house if it would knock your debt out of wack; even if we held onto our home, the amount we owed vs the amount we could add into our worth wouldn't have been a good ratio.(if anybody has been approved with student debt, I'd be interested to hear, as I always heard "you don't have to be rich to adopt" and was surprised about the Ethiopian government net worth rule, since it wasn't noted in the qualifications list, which only mentioned being 125% above the poverty line. We did state how much we pay per month on our various debts vs what we have as excess income, which is pretty good, but unfortunately the net worth was the sticking point, regardless of our available excess income.)We're working to pay down our debt, but are pretty discouraged.