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Adoption
Foster parent question
I have always been interested in adoption, but my DH thinks our family is complete. We are considering fostering, not to adopt. I am not at all sure I can convince DH to do it, but can anyone tell me what the payments are in general for doing it? I know that they would get health insurance through the state, which is our biggest expense for our own children, and we could get a lot of the things we would need from our family/community for free (beds, clothes, ect). Just wondering what portion of the actual expenses the state payments really cover, since we would want a foster child to have the same things as our children have.
Thank you.
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Re: Foster parent question
Well...i'm not sure about others....but personally, in our situation, when you are going through the process, they check to see if you can take care of the children WITHOUT the monthly maintenance fee. Their rationale is that if payments are delayed for some reason or another, you won't be going into debt.
As far as what "our" state pays for...
Housing/Food: Ours pays a monthly maintence fee - this includes food, housing, extra curricular activities, etc. I know that some states are twice has high as mine.
Clothing: We get a 150 dollar clothing stipend (for entire year - follows child) Quite frankly this doesn't pay for much.
Daycare: We get daycare paid for - IF both parents work full time. If one parent works full time and the other works part time, you get part time daycare. If one parent works full time and the other stays home, do not qualify. I know some states - you have to pay for daycare on your own.
Healthcare: Completing paid for - as medicaid. Unfortunately, its hard to find medicaid providers in our area. That's our biggest struggle.
Everything else: Is on us
Hope this helps?
We fully expect to have to pay a good bit of the expenses for the child, we were just hoping that the state would contribute something other than health insurance, so we would not have to take away the extras for our kids, so we could have a foster child. We can well afford and are happy to pay the food, shelter, and clothing for a foster child, but we were hoping the state would contribute something toward the care, so that the child could participate in the same types of activities our kids participate in.
They are not a ton, but maybe $200-$300 a month extra per kid when you factor everything in. I am sure I would not be comfortable not having them participate, so I think if we decided to do it, we would end up paying for them to do those things as well, so we would need to budget at least $7500 a year for all the extra expenses.
The doctor thing is tough. We live near the public hospital for our state, so have more medicaid doctors than other places. There are also a lot of medicaid patients and health clinics in our area, since we are in the city, but again, the doctors are not always who I would choose for my kids, given a choice.
I'm sure you can google your state to find the exact stipend foster parents recieve, but I can tell you in our case, the entire stipend goes towards daycare. Which means everything else (clothes, entertainment, food, ect ect ect) besides healthcare, comes out of our pocket.
Blogs: Our Growing Family - CT Working Moms
Hey! DH and I have seriously considered doing foster care, but like you, I don't think we'll do it until our family is completed. I found all of this information out once, but now I can't remember. I do know there is a fairly decent per diem. It was a few hundred a month and not a lot, but enough to cover basic necessities. In addition there is a small amount that DFCS will spend on clothes. I remember thinking that this amount was very little and that we would probably use part of the per diem or our own funds for additional clothing.
Here's what I found with a google search, but the info is pretty old.
https://dfcs.dhr.georgia.gov/DHR-DFCS/DHR-DFCS_CCFA/FCCRates0605.pdf
Just saw this. The document I found says that the amount for children 5 and under is $13.68 per day, age 6 - 12 is $15.50, and age 13+ is $17.75. These numbers are from 2005.
During the licensing process we had to list all of our financials- they had to make sure we could care for children without the monthly stipend. We get about $700 a month for DD- they did not pay for anything up front- we had to pay for furniture, and all the stuff that you need for a baby. The baby is covered under Medicaid for health care- but that's pretty much it. You can get WIC for formula, but that seemed like to much work for me- I would rather just pay for formula.
The stipend is to go for clothes, food, diapers, the basic necessities. I have no idea how much money I spend on DD- I do keep all our receipts in a folder- so if anything ever investigated we can prove that we spent money on DD- but honeslty I spend way more on her that what we get from the county. We opened up a seperate account- and the check we get every month goes in that account- we don't touch it. We are hoping to adopt DD (and its looking very good right now) so that money will just be for her when she's older.
If you can get stuff for free that's great- that will save you a lot of money.