It is Difficult Getting Money Into India

Now that we have selected the clinic, we need to send a $1,000 down payment to start the process.  This essentially will cover the surrogate selection process and the legal costs for the surrogate contract.  The clinic in India has an online payment site that accepts credit card payments.  They do charge a 2% fee per transaction to cover their credit card fees so we decide to look into doing a wire transfer.

I used to work for a bank, doing a wire transfer is pretty easy.  You just need to make sure that you have the correct wiring instructions for the receiving parties bank.  Well, as we are finding out about a lot of things, when working with a foreign country - especially India - things are never as simple as they should be.

First, the wire transfer fees are significantly higher for a foreign vs. domestic wire transfer.  It will cost us $45 per wire transfer and we are looking at approximately 7-8 throughout this process.  Second, you can run into issues with currency translation rates.  Because there is usually a 1-2 delay from when the funds are sent and when they are received and the translation rates can fluctuate daily, you often run into issues with either over-paying or short-paying in the local currency.  Luckily the clinic accepts payments in USD so we will not have the translation issue.  Third, and really most importantly, the Indian Government gets involved in all transfers to and from the country.  The India Government reviews all payments and only allows them to go though when and if they deem the payments to be acceptable.  For these reasons the credit card payment is looking more and more attractive.

Mark goes ahead and makes the payment on his card and we send the clinic the acceptance number.