So I know the best way to pay for Facial feminization surgery is to save. But what were some of the ways you saved for it or did you find a way to have FFS sooner than expected?
I've been saving for years now and it feel like I still have years left to go before FFS. :-\ Is there like a special loan or something I can apply for to help for surgery?
Hi,
I worked for months on my insurance company and got it covered. It was a very hard process. I told people how to do it and thus far there has been little success. But, people keep giving up....
Very frustrating.
See my thread on how I got insurance to pay for FFS.
Hugs
Jen
I won't lie and pretend I've had it, but I am attending college right now and pursuing the most lucrative degree I can so that I can get it within the next few years. That is, if I still want it. I don't think it's as necessary as people feel like it is.
A long time ago I had a substantial portion of my investment savings vaporize because my investment advisor was lousy. Getting burned like that led me to habitually save almost every spare dollar I earned in cash accounts. I did better at saving in this way, particularly when the high-interest savings accounts appeared and rates were higher, than I ever would have done with investments over the same period. I think it's been something like 20 years I'd continued like that (I have RRSP investments now again finally). I was able to do this by living with my parents, not owning a personal vehicle, and almost never buying anything for myself that wasn't a necessity. Never being given an allowance as a child also taught me the value of money and I'd virtually never leave a found penny on the ground.
Little did I know that all this saving would serve to fund my transition comfortably, not just to stockpile for retirement. My FFS cost over $20,000 Canadian if you include travel and hotel expenses for me and my father. The full cost of my transition will probably come to a total of more than $40,000 by the time I'm done with electrolysis. Had I not lived all of my adult life frugally there's no way I could have afforded transition without unfairly burdening my parents, had they even agreed to pay for anything. Begging them for money would have made my situation dramatically more humiliating and awkward. In the end, my parents decided on their own to pay some of my FFS costs in lieu of future inheritance, but I only accepted it because I could have paid all of it myself and I stressed that it didn't feel right to be taking anyone else's money for my own problem.
Because we didn't have FFS, my issue was funding the entire transition. I started out with $10,000 in the bank and ended up with a total cost of between $30,000 and $40,000. Now in those days, $25,000 was good pay for a year. Living by myself in California, I had rent, food, utilities and auto to pay for and every thing else went into savings for medical expenses. I bought very little for myself and allowed myself one trip to the hamburger stand a week. The remainder of my food was prepared in my kitchen. Expensive cuts of meat were reserved for special meals and most of the time it was ground beef, round steak or a roast. I didn't have a social life to spend money on and sometimes would remain at work late to use the computer for entertainment. Even with a couple of job losses I was able to accumulate the remainder of the money over a 6 year period. I was doing things all during those 6 years such as therapy, electrolyses, light plastic surgery, working on my image and cross living. I never took a second job but that might have been a way to accumulate money faster. The question is what's important to you and how hard are you willing to work for it?
Gonna do FFS in December! Although I do have some money saved up, I'm going to be taking out a loan against my TSP (retirement account) since its really really low interest (like 2%) and gives me the flexibility to spread the cost out over 5 years. Not too worried about drawing from this since I am still really young and I have a bunch of money saved up in that account already.