Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care

What the Heck is Happening with the Adoption Tax Credit? - Weekend Wisdom

Creating a Family Season 19 Episode 36

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Question: On the 2025 Adoption Tax Credit Episode, it was mentioned that they thought this would possibly be the year it becomes refundable. Does that only apply to finalizations in 2025, or will it make previous adoptions (if within the 5-year tax credit range) refundable too? For example, an adoption finalized in 2023 but we haven’t used all of the tax credit available. Does the remaining amount become refundable, too? ~Oklahoma City, OK

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Welcome to Weekend Wisdom by Creating a Family. We are a non -profit, creatingafamily
.org, and I am the director of that non -profit. Weekend Wisdom is our opportunity to
ask your questions, so please send us your questions. We appreciate them because it
gives us something to talk about at Weekend Wisdom, but also it helps us dive
deeper and understand better where some of the questions are in our community. So
today, we're going to be talking about what the heck is happening with the adoption
tax credit. This question came from Oklahoma City. The person says,
"On the 2025 adoption tax credit episode, it was mentioned that they thought this
would possibly be the year it becomes refundable. Does that only apply to
finalizations in 2025, or will it make previous adoptions, if within the past five
years, refundable to. For example, an adoption finalized in 2023, but we haven't used
up all the tax credit available, does that remaining amount become refundable to?
Well, this is not going to be a particular rewarding answer because truly, it all
depends. That is the answer, and of course that is not very rewarding. I realize
that. First, Let me just say that the adoption tax credit has been permanent since
2012, and so I just don't want anybody to get confused here. What we're talking
about and what the question was about was refundability, but the tax credit is
permanent. Don't worry about that. Congress would have to act to take away the tax
credit. Now, let's talk about refundability. The adoption tax credit was refundable
for just two years under Obama's administration, and that was obviously quite a while
ago. It has not been refundable since then, but every year, I believe every year
since then, bills have been introduced into every Congress, into every Congressional
session to make it refundable again, and something to note is that these bills have
always been bipartisan, and again this year a bill has been introduced,
and again, it is bipartisan. So the answer to all of your questions, which are good
ones, that's where the "it depends" comes in, because the truthful answer is we
don't know. It all depends on what is included in the bill. So the best thing all
of us can do is advocate for this bill and its refundability. And the best place
to go for that is adoptiontaxcredit .org.
They will have the bill number, they will have links that will help you make
comments on the bill, and you need to be doing that to your representatives and
your senators. And last but not least, if you don't get your answers at
adoptiontaxcredit .org, you can go to the wonderful Josh Crowell, who you probably
know through our Our adoption tax credit show that we do and our adoption tax
credit course at creatingafamily .org. Josh has very generously given us his email to
share with you and that is joshk @wearefamiliesrising .org.
He is with the nonprofit Families Rising and so I'll give you his email again. It's
at WeAreFamiliesRising .org. And Oklahoma City, I know that you wanted specific
answers. Sorry, I couldn't give those to you, but I hope this at least sends you
in the right direction. And before everybody leaves, let me remind them that creating
a family needs your reviews, be it YouTube, be it Spotify,
be it Apple, whatever you're using, they make recommendations based on the number of
reviews. Star reviews, our written reviews, we'll take any of it, we'll take all of
it. So please do us a favor and pop over and you can find it on any app you're
using and shoot us a review, we really appreciate it. Thank you so much and tell
your friends about this and we'll see you next time. Bye.