Julie Gumm - Author

Catch me in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Nashville, Birmingham

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Three weeks from tomorrow I will depart on what I’ve now named “The Fall Tour.”

It started with being invited to do a breakout at the Together for Adoption Conference in Atlanta on September 14th. This is my third year to attend and second year to do a breakout. I love these conferences – meeting other adoptive families and orphan care professionals feels like coming home.

Then I found out just a few weeks later that Jon Acuff scheduled one of his Quitter Conferences for the following weekend. I google mapped the distance between Atlanta and Nashville in about 3.4 seconds. I’ve wanted to attend Quitter since the first one but the travel cost made it kind of expensive. The actual conference is only about $100.

I gave my husband my best pretty-please puppy-dog eyes and asked if I could just stay over. I have a friend in Atlanta so my lodging was cheap and I thought maybe I could schedule 1 or 2 Adopt Without Debt Workshops to fill in the time.

Before I knew it I had four more workshops lined up with one more still being finalized.

You can see the complete details on my Upcoming Events page, but here’s the quick overview. If you’re in one of these towns I’d love to see you at the event.

Sept 14 – Atlanta: Together for Adoption Conference
Sept 15 – Indianapolis: Crossroads of America Adoption Conference
Sept 17 – Southern Piedmont Adoptive Families of America 
Sept 18 – Hang out with friends in Knoxville
Sept 19 – Drive to Nashville, hopefully meet Dave Ramsey
Sept 19 or 20 – Tentative workshop in Nashville
Sept 21-22 – Attend QuitterSept 23 – GRACELAND 🙂
Sept 24 – Birmingham: Lifeline Children’s Services sponsored workshop
Sept 24 – Atlanta: Lifeline Children’s Services sponsored workshop

How we paid for our debt-free adoption

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Mark and I are on a little kid-free giveaway so this is a repost.

It cost us about $28,000 to adopt both kids, including travel (2 tickets round trip + 2 tickets one-way home; this was before Ethiopia was a 2 trip country).

We didn’t start down this road without a plan. First, we had approximately $10,000 in savings. Then, as I mentioned, we had just finished paying off our house around the time we started the process.

For the last 2 1/2 years we had been throwing every extra penny we had at the mortgage – to the tune of about $2,200 a month. With it paid off, we could use that money for the adoption. We estimated that the process was going to take us 6-9 months (it was actually 12) so that would mean $13-19,000. Depending on the time frame we knew we might need to come up with a few extra thousand dollars but knew that we could do that pretty easily with some belt-tightening and fundraising.

That was the PLAN.

But, well, God had OTHER plans. About 2 months into the process Mark left his job. Probably seems like a totally crazy thing, but we knew it was what God wanted him to do. On the one hand I was working again and making enough money to support us (thankfully we didn’t have many bills now). On the other hand that extra $13-19k was not going to be there.

And I will admit, I fell off the bandwagon. I said “well, if we have to take out an interest-free adoption loan, we’ll just pay it off as soon as we can”. But that didn’t sit right with us. And then God used Dave Ramsey to speak incredible truth into my life once again. (You can read about that here.) And so we renewed our commitment to do this adoption debt-free. It just meant God was going to have to show up.

And we were going to have to work hard.

We didn’t get any anonymous $5,000 checks in the mail and to be honest, this list is, at best, approximation of how we paid for it. All I know is that EVERY time we needed to write a check (because thankfully the costs are spread out), we had the money.

Savings $10,000
Budget tightening and savings during process $2k
Severance package (TOTALLY not expected since Mark resigned) $4k
Garage sale $2,300
Mark selling stuff on ebay $2k
Julie’s freelance income (God brought a ton of jobs) $5k

We were down to the wire with the last $3k we needed for travel. We had said early on that one thing we could do, was sell Mark’s car. He worked from home and we knew that we could get along with one car until we could save up cash to buy a replacement. His older Toyota Camry (because we only drive paid-for cars) was worth about $4-5k. But God pulled off a miracle at the last little bit and gave us exactly the $3k we needed from an unexpected source.

This is just OUR story. There are so many more stories of people who have done this all kinds of different ways. Some of them have started with NOTHING saved and God has still showed up big time.

It’s not easy. Debt is always going to SEEM like the easy way out. But if you are willing to work at it, and make some sacrifices, it can be done!