My Story

The chronicle of the journey from infertility, to miscarriage, to finally raising twin girls born in June 2012.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

All-In vs Desperate Flailing

When I first discussed going all-in, I was thinking that I had to incur the debt of prepurchasing some plans that allow for multiple attempts.  Get my hands on every penny and bit of credit I could get my hands on and invest in those multiple attempts so that no matter how broke we are, or how often we might fail, we can still try again for what's really important.

Despite my "pulling back" posts, we're still going all in.  We've just discovered that the way I wanted to go about it was actually just desperate flailing.

We've made the commitment to ourselves that no matter what it takes, we are going to keep trying until we're successful.  However, it's smarter to invest financially piece by piece rather than all at once.

If we prepurchased a $50,000 plan that afforded 3 attempts - if we get pregnant on that first attempt, we don't get to keep the other two.  The contract ends.  All we've guaranteed is that the child cost us $50k.

But if we do this piece by piece, if it takes us 3 attempts, that same child could cost us $70k.  Or it's very likely that it will cost actually only cost the initial $20k that we're investing in the one fresh+frozen cycle.

So knowing that I'm a very good candidate for IVF, that it's very likely that either fresh or frozen attempt will indeed result in a child, it's not a smart gamble to guarantee ourselves $50k in debt when it's very likely we can get the same result from $20k.

So that's the math that we're doing right now.  How do we do as much all-in as we can without crossing the line into desperate flailing.  Desperate flailing doesn't help matters at all and can hurt us in the long run.

If the early attempts don't work, we will likely spend more in the long run.  But when we decided that we were all in, we committed in our minds that we will keep trying, damned the costs.  But it's a smarter decision to incur this debt piece by piece until we don't have anymore pieces rather than guarantee we run out of pieces when we probably don't need to.  Who knows, what we save in interest by not incurring that debt today might actually equal whatever a third attempt costs us a few years from now.

I failed math once when I was younger.  I chose career paths that avoided math.  I can not believe how much math I now do in my life.

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