Adoption is expensive. Seriously.

According to AdoptiveFamilies.com, it cost an average of $44,000 for international adoptions and $40,000 for newborn adoptions in the US for adoptions finalized in 2016-17. I don’t know about you, but that’s not money that we had lying around the house when we started our adoption journey in early 2016.

We brought our beautiful daughter home from China in August 2017. After all was said and done, we spent $35,123.51. But who’s counting?

When we began the process, we were an average middle-class family with two incomes totaling less than $100,000 per year, a mortgage, no real assets other than my car and the stuff in the house, and with a little in savings to cover emergencies. We also had another child at home and all the expenses that come with living in today’s society.

My goal was funding our adoption without going into debt and without completely wiping out our savings. After all, we needed to be able to afford to raise both of our kiddos after we completed the journey. I have fundraising and grant writing experience from years of working in the nonprofit sector, so I wasn’t intimidated to begin. But that didn’t make the goal any less daunting considering we were trying to get money for ourselves, not another entity.

I’m happy to report that we finalized our adoption without loans and without wiping out all our savings!

And you can do it, too! How? Read on for eight ways that we funded our adoption without debt.

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1. Cut spending

This may sound obvious, but I think it is the most important way to start. We were going to ask people for money, so we had to demonstrate that we were doing all that we could ourselves. This meant no beach vacation, less eating out, no frivolous purchases, less shopping, and sticking to our budget. We looked at our monthly and yearly expenses, planned what we were going to spend, and tried our best to follow the plan for funding our adoption.

2. Save money you would normally spend

My husband’s company gives out annual bonuses that normally come around the same time as our tax refund. We usually use this money to do a project around the house, pay off a debt*, or a similar big-ticket item.

Because of the long timeline for our adoption, we could save two years of bonuses and tax refunds for this purpose. There were some small non-adoption expenses we designated this money for, but the vast majority was stashed away.

We also saved Christmas and birthday gifts and other extra cash that came our way all for the purpose of funding our adoption.

(For some easy ways to get started saving money, check out this post!)

3. Apply for adoption grants

There are so many wonderful grantmaking organizations out there who support adoption! I will be outlining many of them in future posts. Their purpose is to give money away to help families like yours bring kids home. Each organization has different target recipients, but I would venture to say that almost everyone meets the qualifications to apply for at least one of them.

I’ll be honest and say that I really thought that we would fund our entire adoption through grants. After all, I was a professional grant writer, we weren’t super wealthy, and we wanted to give a home to an orphan. We should be a shoe-in, right? Well…

After our home study was complete (this is required for most grants), I hit grant writing hard. We applied for eight grants within a month. I took a break at that point because it should DEFINITELY be enough to cover our costs once awarded. Oh, how naïve I was!

We were denied, and denied, and denied. Seven times we were turned down. But we were approved for one! It was a $4,000 matching grant from Lifesong for Orphans. Fantastic! Woo hoo! The catch was that we were required us to fundraise at least $4,000 to secure the match. Which takes me to my next point…

Check out my post on how to write a successful Lifesong grant application here. 

4. Ask Your Friends and Family

This one is hard because you must really put yourself out there. To people you know. And many of them are going to say no.

But you should do it anyway.

For us, receiving the matching grant was a blessing in so many ways. Lifesong provided us with an online adoption fundraising portal for people to give tax-deductible gifts. We pushed it on social media and made personal asks to select family members. People liked that their money was being doubled, that they could write it off on their taxes, and they were helping a child.

We raised $8,810.74 through this alone, making it our most successful fundraiser.

I did direct mail and major gifts fundraising during my nonprofit tenure. Do you know the number one reason that people don’t give? Because they aren’t asked.

You need to tell your story and then clearly ask for adoption funding. Then don’t be afraid to follow up. Some people really want to support adoption, but won’t ever actually adopt a child themselves. Helping bring your new addition home may be something they want to do. Others may just want to support you. Giving people a way to be involved may be a blessing to them.

There are a number of ways to solicit family and friends. You can partner with an online adoption fundraising resource like we did. Or you can mail letters, make phone calls, ask on social media, or meet with people in person.

However, don’t expect everyone you know to pitch in and take care of all the adoption expenses. There are also people who can’t give, those who won’t give, and those who are offended that you even asked.

Deal with them graciously and move on. Adoption isn’t for everyone. And paying to give you a child is not something your friends and family are required to do. Try not to take it personally and move on.

While you should ask people to help fund your adoption, you don’t want to burn them out. No one wants to hang out with the cousin who only asks for money. Your Facebook friends will block you if only push your adoption fundraising page. Your family will stop inviting you to functions if you only contact them to check on their donation.

In other words, don’t be annoying.

5. Hold Adoption Fundraisers

Your greater sphere of influence may be more likely to contribute to your adoption if they are purchasing something instead of just making a donation. This is where adoption fundraisers come in. In addition to just asking people you know, some fundraisers will yield money from other people with a soft spot for adoption or complete strangers.

Some are more successful than others, and many are labor intensive. Be sure to choose ones that you think would be appealing to your target audience and things that you don’t mind doing. It is also a good idea to have an adoption fundraising plan that spaces out your events to avoid burnout and to capitalize on good timing.

We had five major adoption fundraisers:

1. Adoption Yard Sale – raised $2,130.75
2. Superhero Cape Sales – raised $547.50
3. Bonfire Adoption T-shirts – raised $204.69
4. Noonday Collection Event – raised $108.60
5. Team Goodpaster T-shirts – raised $1,000

We did the superhero cape sales shortly after completing our home study and telling our intentions to adopt publicly. This capitalized on the initial excitement and was before Halloween so that they could be used as costumes.

The Noonday Collection event was completely out of the blue. A friend of a former coworker of mine contacted me because she sold Noonday Collection products and said she needed an adoptive family as a beneficiary for a jewelry and accessory sales event.

I just had to promote what she was doing among my friends and I got a portion of the sales for the adoption. If you have circles of friends and family who would enjoy these handmade items, you should look into this because the Noonday Collection company is passionate about adoption.

We designed and sold some Bonfire t-shirts to our friends and family in the spring before we were matched. This was not as successful as we had seen other t-shirt adoption fundraisers be, but Bonfire was easy to work with, had a quality product, and wasn’t much work for us. (And if you are interested in working with them for your own adoption shirts, use my Bonfire referral link and we both get an extra dollar for the first 100 shirts you sell!)

Our adoption yard sale was scheduled for the first weekend in June, a few weeks after nearby neighborhood yard sales to avoid the crowd (and to work around my son’s soccer schedule). Coincidentally, we were matched with our daughter in May, so we could have photos and the story of an actual child for this event.

Most of what we sold came from donations. I asked on Facebook if anyone had items they were looking to get rid of and posted on the Nextdoor app the day of the neighborhood yard sales asking if I could pick up items that didn’t sell. The response was so overwhelming that we had to turn items away! This was really labor intensive for a few weeks, but profitable. (Read more tips from my adoption fundraiser yard sale and other expert advice here.)

The Team Goodpaster adoption fundraiser was a surprise t-shirt campaign that one of my dear friends organized and executed with some help with other friends and family. We had no idea that dozens and dozens of our friends bought shirts. They were printed by a local printer with the proceeds given to us for the adoption.

Supporters even had an organized day to post photos of themselves in the shirts on social media for us to see! It was an unbelievable gesture and one of those things that proved that there is definitely good in the world. I was presented with a check at my adoption shower about a month before we left for China.

Obviously, your adoption fundraisers may look different from mine. But the takeaway is that with some effort and planning, you can be successful! Also, as in the case of a couple of ours, you may be surprised with the incredible generosity of people to organize things beyond what you could do on your own. (Need some creative ways to fund your adoption? Click here to get a copy of my 101 Adoption Fundraising Ideas.)

Click here to learn how you can earn an extra $1 per shirt with Bonfire.

6. Sell Your Stuff

In addition to the adoption fundraiser yard sale, we also sold things we didn’t need anymore. While we didn’t have any big-ticket items, you may have a pool table, extra car, piece of land, or something similar that could put a nice dent in your fund.

For us, selling some old clothes, housewares, and collectibles on eBay and local online marketplaces made an easy couple hundred bucks. (If you create an account on Poshmark using my promo code JPGOODPASTER, you’ll get a $5 credit!) Plus, it helped clean out the closets to get ready for our newest family member!

7. Increase Your Revenue

Easier said than done, right? For some people, increasing revenue may mean taking any raises given at work during the adoption process and putting that money into savings. Or it may be a temporary side job, working overtime, or picking up a few extra shifts.

For us, this was on a much smaller scale but required almost no extra time from us during a very busy season of our lives. I focused on passive ways to make money.

For example, we’ve had a rewards credit card for ages. Typically, I only used it for gas, but after reading through the fine print, realized I could be getting cash back on groceries, restaurants, and other purchases. We switched from using our debit card to the credit card so that we could get the rewards to use for adoption funding.

It is VERY IMPORTANT to note that using a rewards credit card for the cash back is only helpful if you pay the credit card off each month. We set it up to be automatically drafted from our checking account each month so that this wasn’t an issue and still treated purchases like debits in our budget.

The credit card rewards made us nearly $350 for the adoption. Some people use frequent flyer miles or hotel rewards cards for this same purpose. Our adoption agency booked our hotels and we were concerned with potential blackout dates with the airlines, so we opted for the cash.

Another easy money maker was Ebates/Rakuten. This website (and app) gives you cash back for your online shopping if you start at their website. I talked more about Rakuten here. During our adoption process I made almost $200 from them (my lifetime earning is more than $530!).

8. Claim the Adoption Tax Credit

If you can claim the entire Adoption Tax Credit, you can get back $13,810 per child (as of 2018) on your taxes. But before you jump for joy too much, this one relies on the federal government and the IRS. So I’ll warn you up front that it is complicated and varies from person to person and administration to administration. In fact, right after we finalized our adoption the Adoption Tax Credit was almost completely removed from the tax code!

If eligible based on your income and tax liability, this credit can offset some qualified expenses for both domestic and international adoptions. Because we adopted internationally, we had to wait to file after the adoption was finalized, meaning that we could only be reimbursed for what was already spent. Domestic adoptions will let you file each year even if the adoption isn’t final yet.

This credit is not refundable, meaning that it is limited to your tax liability for the year. In other words, if you are required to pay the IRS only $3,000 in taxes for the year, you can only get that amount back. The good news is that you can carry over the balance for up to five years until you reach the full amount of the credit.

You can’t claim expenses that you paid for with grants, and you must have good records of everything in case of an audit. There are also income limitations. You can read more about it on the IRS website, and I recommend talking to a tax professional about your specific situation.

Thankfully, we could claim the credit, but we didn’t have enough tax liability to get the entire thing this year. We will be carrying it over for the next few years, and hope that nothing in tax law changes during that time to affect it. So this can be extremely helpful after the fact, but I wouldn’t put all of your eggs in the IRS basket…

Unless you already have the money available to cover all your adoption expenses, you will probably have to do some combination of the above steps to fund your adoption. Some families have great luck with grants and have a significant portion funded there. Others have successful adoption fundraisers that yield the majority of their funds. Or you may choose to put all your energy into a side gig for a year or so and make the money that way.

Everyone’s situation is different, so find what works for your family. The silver lining of the long wait for typical adoptions is that you have some time to find the funding mix that fits your needs. For us, a lot of faith and some hard work proved to be fruitful. We are so amazed at the way God multiplied our efforts to bring our girl home without us incurring a burden of adoption debt in the process.

Read about our adoption journey here. For more ways to fund an adoption, get your free list of 101 Adoption Fundraising Ideas and visit my Adoption Grants and Fundraising page. What ideas do you have that I didn’t discuss? Please let me know in the comments section. I’d love to hear from you!

*Note: We had paid off student loans, credit card debt, and car loans in previous years. Other than our mortgage, we were debt free! I realize that this may not be true in your situation, so you may need to increase your timeline or add additional income-increasing measures to your plan if you are paying off debt. My personal recommendation is to try to pay down debt BEFORE your adoption is final so that you will have one less stressor after you have your little one home. 

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You may also like:

How to Make Money with an Adoption T-Shirt Fundraiser

How to Complete a Lifesong for Orphans Adoption Grant Application

6 Expert Tips for a Successful Adoption Fundraiser Yard Sale