Anonymous wrote:I am the $150K+ poster. I want to mention that we are not rich. I spent all my savings that I had from 12 years of working. My husband ran the house. We put a lot of it on credit card and still paying it off. We started with a $30K budget. When it didn't work out, we decided to one more cycle and one more and one more. The process gets very addictive. It feels like a gamble. After every failure, you kinda decide that I am not going to do it again but you still want to do it.

+1

Ditto ditto ditto, though we might only be around $130K. When we started IUIs when I was 37 (w/MFI) I never in a million years thought it would take us so long to find success. Then there comes a time when you doubt anything will work. I drew a line in the sand (okay, we'll do IUIs, but never IVF--too expensive). When the IUIs don't work you re-draw the line in the sand (okay, we'll do 2 IVF cycles, but if that doesn't work we won't do donor sperm or donor egg--where would we get the money?!). I had a loss during cycle 2 of IVF--the line was re-drawn once again. We will try donor eggs. We will do a guaranteed program. We will bring home a baby or get our $31k back. (We've done 2 shared risk guarantee programs and luckily were not refunded.

Women/couples who know when to stop are so much stronger than I ever could be. We had 2 frozen from our shared risk cycle--one did not thaw, the other resulted in a c/p. I told myself so many times, if those did not result in siblings--we were done and so very lucky anyway! The c/p set the sibling dream in motion, so I re-drew the line again and we cycled with another donor.

The heart wants what it wants. (Even when the bank account disagrees.)

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am the $150K+ poster. I want to mention that we are not rich. I spent all my savings that I had from 12 years of working. My husband ran the house. We put a lot of it on credit card and still paying it off. We started with a $30K budget. When it didn't work out, we decided to one more cycle and one more and one more. The process gets very addictive. It feels like a gamble. After every failure, you kinda decide that I am not going to do it again but you still want to do it.

I love your optimism! I wish you best of luck and hope you have a baby one day to bring home. Is there a point you will move to a surrogate?

No,I was never optimistic. The process was addictive. I had twins on 10th IVF cycle. I posted about it before. We tried surrogacy twice and it failed.

Anonymous wrote:I am the $150K+ poster. I want to mention that we are not rich. I spent all my savings that I had from 12 years of working. My husband ran the house. We put a lot of it on credit card and still paying it off. We started with a $30K budget. When it didn't work out, we decided to one more cycle and one more and one more. The process gets very addictive. It feels like a gamble. After every failure, you kinda decide that I am not going to do it again but you still want to do it.

I love your optimism! I wish you best of luck and hope you have a baby one day to bring home. Is there a point you will move to a surrogate?

Anonymous wrote:I am the $150K+ poster. I want to mention that we are not rich. I spent all my savings that I had from 12 years of working. My husband ran the house. We put a lot of it on credit card and still paying it off. We started with a $30K budget. When it didn't work out, we decided to one more cycle and one more and one more. The process gets very addictive. It feels like a gamble. After every failure, you kinda decide that I am not going to do it again but you still want to do it.

+1

I am the $150K+ poster. I want to mention that we are not rich. I spent all my savings that I had from 12 years of working. My husband ran the house. We put a lot of it on credit card and still paying it off. We started with a $30K budget. When it didn't work out, we decided to one more cycle and one more and one more. The process gets very addictive. It feels like a gamble. After every failure, you kinda decide that I am not going to do it again but you still want to do it.

You are soo lucky to get success with $10,000........spent over 45k still no luck

About $75k for 8 cycles (5 fresh IVF 3 FETS) and two children.
We paid from savings. I was 34 with my first and 38 with my second.

Total was about $30k. First DD IVF covered. It paid for meds. Twins came from shared risk which was $22k plus meds.

We did not have ART (so I guess I should probably not even be responding... feel free to disregard I guess ) so this price only includes immune treatments for 3 children. Testing, meds and other OOP expenses including travel. They were pregnancies 9, 10, and 11.

DC #1 spent 18k including and leading up to that. I know that figure based on the fact that we had accumulated enough for a medical tax deduction that year. DC #2 and #3 about 10k each including OOP expenses with testing, meds, treatments and some travel expenses too.

Grand total 38k for 3 successful pregnancies yes we are very fortunate and I totally realize that. When we started this process we lived in a one bedroom condo so that really helped us pay for things as they came and didn't have a ton of debt associated with treatments.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm just starting this process and wrote a big check last week. For those who've spent $50k and up - did that all just come out of savings? Did you have financial help from family? Did you use loans or some other financing? We are budgeting for 3 cycles max. If that doesn't work, we'll reassess then - I'm leaning towards making peace with it and maybe getting a dog at some point. DH probably would want to adopt. We'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it.

I'm one of the PPs who spent over $100k. I didn't qualify for shared risk and had no family help or loans. I used up all savings and then lived very frugally and used downtime between cycles, which I seemed to have a lot of, to save more.

Were you successful?

Anonymous wrote:We spent about $50K all in for our kids (6 IUIs, 2 fresh cycles, 2 FETs).

I used savings for everything but our shared risk cycle, which I put on no-interest credit cards that I opened just for this and paid off within a year.

I was 30-31 for the IUIs and first IVF, which resulted in DC#1. I was 33-34 for the shared risk cycles, which resulted in DC#2 and DC#3.

Anonymous wrote:15k. 3 IUIs, 1 IVF- 1 kid. I feel incredibly lucky. Now that I have her, dh and I have agreed that we'd spend 100k for another. At the time the money really stressed me out, but now it seems SO worth it.

Age- 27 for the first IUIs, 30 for the IVF. We had TTC since we were 25.

OP here. It is amazing how much $$ people spent. It really put things in perspective for me that we really didn't spend all that much.

Can you also post your age at first IVF cycle?

Anonymous wrote:I'm just starting this process and wrote a big check last week. For those who've spent $50k and up - did that all just come out of savings? Did you have financial help from family? Did you use loans or some other financing? We are budgeting for 3 cycles max. If that doesn't work, we'll reassess then - I'm leaning towards making peace with it and maybe getting a dog at some point. DH probably would want to adopt. We'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it.

I'm one of the PPs who spent over $100k. I didn't qualify for shared risk and had no family help or loans. I used up all savings and then lived very frugally and used downtime between cycles, which I seemed to have a lot of, to save more.