[kirstyloo]

My DH and I looked at agencies and at in-house donors. While we actually preferred the women through the agencies better as they had done it before and were able to find closer physical / educational matches, we waited until an in-house donor became available who was a pretty good fit. She had my coloring and build and good family health history. My DH was a bit disappointed because he likes my nose, hands and feet…and they weren’t a match. That being said, her features are more like my DH’s facial features so it is likely that our child would have inherited them from him anyway.

We ended up using an in-house donor because of the cost. DE IVF with an in-house donor wound up being about $8000-8500 more than traditional IVF. The extra costs included $5000 donor fee, $1500 monitoring for the recipient and coordinating the cycle, $1800 screening of the donor, $200 counseling fees, and $300 legal fees. If we had used an agency, it would have added on average $3000 to the donor fee (most were $8000-10,000/donor), a $5000 donor agency charge, $800 legal fees through the agency, and travel. Travel and donor monitoring were big questions marks. Travel would need to include airplane tickets for the initial consultation for 2 people plus 1-2 days hotels stay with $50/person per diem and then airplane tickets for the ER plus 7 days hotel stay with $50/person per diem for monitoring and retrieval. Because monitoring would likely occur at another site, we didn’t know how much it would be. We estimated that it would cost $14,000-18,000 (total $39,000 - 42,000) more to use an agency donor that needed to fly in.

We live in the NE where expenses run high. I did think about traveling to have the procedure done, but it would have been really hard with my teaching and my DH's work schedule.

DE IVF ended up costing us $22,000 plus $1500 for ISCI and $1800 for embryo freezing and storage. We also probably added in about $2000 for co-pays for my initial RE consultation, blood work for me and my DH, and co-pays for blood work and US after my BFP. Because we had most of our cost in 2008, we were able to deduct part of it from our income taxes. In retrospect, I wish that we didn’t do health care spending account for the year that we did DE IVF as it complicated our paperwork. I do wish that I had put more in for the year corresponding to my pregnancy. I never realized how many large and small expenses there would be during the pregnancy. I'm guessing that we'll keep getting costs once the baby is born.