We were slowly saving in a reasonably half-hearted way for a house deposit. That money got redirected to IVF.

We paid cash upfront for each cycle, with the medicare rebates going back into that account. Killing the medicare safety net limit helped heaps, but as our treatment spanned two years we had to do it twice.

From experience - if your treatment is going to go over two calendar years, try to time things so that you have a FET cycle first up to kill the safety net, and then everything else is a whole lot easier. Not awalys possible, but it helped us out a lot at the start of this year to do it that way.

After three stim cycles and three and a half frozen embryo transfers (half because our last embryo failed to thaw) even with the recycling of medicare rebates, we'd depleted the savings and were at the point of having to save like mad to be able to go again. Fortunately, that last transfer took.

Of course, using existing savings is only an option if they exist - but we don't have a mortgage to redraw on (we rent) and really didn't want to get a credit card with a limit high enough to cover our stim cycles as we'd be tempted to use it for other things and then have trouble paying it off. It's all a matter of finding the system that works for you.

BW