Financing IVF

[Pinklady81]

Hello

A topic that I'm sure most of you have faced if you have gone private . I'm looking at £20,000 for a 3 cycle package and wondered how everyone did this finance wise . I'm not fortunate enough to have this in savings and wondered how you all managed to do this as it's keeping me awake at night on top of all the other infertility worries and concerns about IVF. Any help would be really appreciated . Thank you x

We borrowed against our mortgage. Was the only way we could afford it.

We used savings, and an Access Fertility package. We put a smaller deposit on our house as we knew we'd be starting fertility treatment

@YouBoggleMyMind that sounds like a good plan but I think that maybe a timely process to get the money and I'm ready possibly to start within a month or so

You can get an "advance" relatively quickly. Just need to speak with your Mortgage provider.

@YouBoggleMyMind can you we have a lot of equity in the house so that may be worth a shot thank you

Good luck 🤞🏻

First £25k we remortgaged house - added about £100 a month on to the repayments

Second £13.5k we took a bank loan over 5 years - the cost of full time time childcare in the U.K. starts at £1k a month - the cost of giving up even a minimum wage job to be a stay at home parent is at least £1k a month. We lived like we had a child and put this into savings for a further back up fund of £13k
(We figured if we couldn't afford it before we had a baby we certainly couldn't afford if it worked)
....cautionary tale though....I had twins so that messed up all my careful financial planning 😂

I'm seriously looking at Access Fertility as away of reducing the costs a little. But you might not be able to work with the clinic of your choice as only some 'partner clinics' work with AF.

@Kay00 I don't qualify for these packages but they sound great

@Pinklady81 have a look at bpas too. They’ve just opened a not for profit clinic and things should work out a bit cheaper, I believe the prices are online now. They’re doing free initial consultations.

With regards to financing, we have one nhs round but after that we’re using savings. Most of which we’ve accumulated in the year plus of tests, and my hope is we can save for another round over the next few months. Some house and car stuff has had to take a back seat.

My cycle costs won't be a couple of months saving it's £20000

@Pinklady81 We used access for a 2 cycle package which costs £8,300 (+ meds) so aprons 12k in total - we figured we would do 2x 2 cycle rounds rather than the initial 18k it was for 3 cycles as £12k is easier to find

We found a 0% credit card over 2 cards so paid no interest and did a cash transfer as access don't accept credit card then we paid for the meds using credit card ( Asda pharmacy for the drugs as this is also a bit of a savings )

Luckily we were successful on round 2 (currently 12wks) and partners earnings are good so we've almost paid it off.

But doing what we did is an option and doing a payment plan

X

Interest free credit cards but you need a plan to pay them off or it would end up costing more.

Go abroad. It was 4000 euros for 2 OE/OS cycles (including transfers), plus meds which were so much cheaper there. The cost of travelling and accommodation still didn’t take the overall cost to London prices. I also had immune treatments - I think I spent around £10k in total. Funded with savings.

@Velvetscrunchy Where overseas did you go? And how much extra would you say the meds were on top of the 4000€?