“I Saved All The Receipts”: Surrogacy Intended Dad Reveals His Costs Spreadsheet

Anthony, a gay dad-to-be, is currently in the middle of his journey with his husband. He has created an updated cost spreadsheet of his journey, and revealed it to Daddy Squared in an attempt to help other intended dads with their budgeting by sharing this great tool.

For gay men who want to build their family through surrogacy, financing the surrogacy journey is still the biggest obstacle, and unfortunately, prices only go up. The surrogacy journey is very hard to plan financially, and part of the budgeting problem is the many tiny components that it includes, like tests, travel, unsuccessful transfers, and more.

Anthony, a gay dad-to-be from Florida, is currently in the middle of his journey with his husband Justin. He has created an updated cost spreadsheet of his journey, and turned to Daddy Squared in an attempt to help other intended dads with their budgeting by sharing this great tool.

“I saved all the receipts because I thought it was super important to see what this was costing us,” he tells us. “I have a whole spreadsheet of what the donor journey costs and what the gestational carrier has cost us so far. Yes, by day I work as a project manager/ account executive so spreadsheets are life but I really wanted to show people that its more than you think and there is enough stress surrounding having the procedure take let alone the money it takes to get everything done.”

Looking back at his spendings so far, Anthony thinks that had he done more research prior to his journey, he might have been able to lower the costs. “I would shop around for clinics,” he says. “People are in business to make money and you can always ask questions. I’m a little upset with myself that I didn’t know that sooner, I started questioning prices once we did our second round of our surrogate’s screening and they offered us discounts that we didn’t know were offered before which really made me upset, honestly. But we’re so grateful for being in the position that we are able to afford everything and not be stressed about money. We sold our home which at some point we were going to do anyway but it was about 3 years sooner than expected. But we didn’t want to be in debt with a baby. Rather, we wanted to be building our worth back up to afford a home big enough for hopefully the 4 of us.”

Anthony and his husband started their surrogacy journey back in in 2019 when they first tried to do traditional surrogacy, where the surrogate is also the egg donor. “We had a close family friend willing to be our surrogate,” Anthony recalls. “We had tried 3 times but because she had given birth recently we felt her body wasn’t taking the sperm and decided to take another route. It was really up and down every time we would do a transfer and got together for a urine test and saw no results and the emotions got tense.”

“We then started exploring if we could afford gestational surrogacy and speaking with agencies. We met with PBFC in south Florida to create embryos and went through 2 donors which again added to our timeline of the whole process, the first donor had a genetic disorder we were not comfortable working with. The second donor gave us 22 eggs, 16 fertilized and 11 went into PGT testing. Our result was 5 PGT perfect little hatchlings! It was so crazy to see the numbers keep dwindling and the nerves were high when we got the call we had 3 boys and 2 girls from both of our sperm. We still don’t know whose are who though and will never ask. After being matched in March 2022, our surrogate failed screenings and again, it was another two months wait to be rematched, did all the screenings and cleared legal. We did our transfer in August.

The heartbreaking news is that unfortunately, their surrogate miscarried and the couple have to start all over again, which, of course, has a tremendous effect on the costs.

“Every journey is different so one-price-fits-all is a bad assumption,” Anthony says as he opened his costs spreadsheet to us. “Up to this point were hovering around 150k with still 45k in escrow and now we have to reassess the situation and how we will proceed from here.”

The Spreadsheet: Anthony’s Receipts for Egg Donation and Surrogacy (So Far…)

Expenses Summary

*Egg donor compensation was $6,000. The rest is clinic and procedure fees.