Few baby boomers are prepared for their own funerals. Even though humans have a 100% mortality rate, less than 30% of adults do advance funeral planning. But here’s a secret: you don’t have to spend your children’s inheritance on a funeral. Here are some helpful tips about advanced funeral planning.
As The Doyenne of Death®, I’m always encouraging people to plan for this guaranteed inevitability. While I had put my wishes on file with a funeral home and got a price quote back in 2015, my husband and I didn’t pay for those arrangements at the time. In 2022, I finally decided to go ahead with finalizing and paying for our funerals.
What do you need to know before you go to a funeral home to pre-plan for your own eventual demise? We’ll cover these three tips …
Tip #1 – Know Your Preferences
Tip #2 – Preplanning Isn’t the Same as Prepaying
Tip #3 – You Don’t Have to Pay Everything Upfront
Tip #1 – Know Your Preferences
Before going to plan your arrangements, be educated about what you want and how to get it!
If you want green burial or an outside-the-box send-off, be prepared to advocate for your choices. Both my husband and I chose wicker caskets for our burials. The funeral home had them as a choice when we first put our wishes on file in 2015. But the preneed salesperson (not a funeral director), only offered simple wooden caskets for our Jewish burial preferences.
I walked from the arrangement room to the display room down the hall and pointed out several urns by a noted green burial product provider. The catalogue for that provider was in the display room. We were able to get the eco-friendly basket caskets in the catalogue because we knew what we wanted and who provided those products. Do your research before visiting the funeral home!
The preneed salesperson (who had less than a year of experience) was not well versed in Jewish funeral traditions. Jewish burial is naturally green burial, using biodegradable caskets and avoiding embalming. The salesperson said if we weren’t embalmed, we could only have a graveside funeral. This is not true! My husband’s father’s funeral was held at the synagogue, with a closed casket, which is the tradition. After consulting with a funeral director, the preneed salesperson was set straight. It’s okay to have a closed casket funeral without embalming (just no viewing). It helps to know your religion’s funeral traditions and state’s embalming rules.
Tip #2 – Preplanning Isn’t the Same as Prepaying
You can put your vital information and choices on file with a funeral and not prepay. It’s good to have the details for a death certificate and your choices already noted. As the preneed salesperson pointed out, however, the cost of goods and services will increase over the years.
If you prepay with an insurance policy, it guarantees and “locks in” today’s prices for the costs that the funeral home controls. This includes their service fees, casket and embalming costs, memorial printing packages, and so forth. However, outside costs like obituaries, motorcycle escorts for funeral processions, and taxes are not guaranteed. Those will continue to go up.
When the funeral plans are finalized, tweaks made to the plans can result in money being returned to the family, or more money may need to be paid.
Tip #3 – You Don’t Have to Pay Everything Upfront
When you make funeral arrangements in advance, in most states, you don’t give your money directly to the funeral home. You buy an insurance policy that you own, with the funeral home as the beneficiary. Some states have funeral trust funds to keep consumers’ money safe. With insurance or a trust fund, if the funeral home goes out of business or is sold to another company, don’t lose your money.
When making preneed financing arrangements with insurance, you may be offered payment options, stretching from three to 20 years. If you are healthy and die before paying off the policy, it will cover the entire cost. If you have health issues, you may be issued a graded policy which will only cover the amount of money you’ve paid toward the policy. The rest would have to be paid upon the death of the insured.
However, financing charges over time will add to the total cost of the funeral arrangements, negating your preplanning cost-saving efforts. Payments of a few hundred dollars a month can add thousands to the overall cost. We were offered the option to pay the balance in 90 days, same as cash.
Should you move to another market, your insurance policy is portable. The money can be used to pay another funeral home, although you lose the benefit of “locking in” today’s prices with the original funeral home. If your money is held in a state’s funeral trust fund, you should be able to get your money back with interest.
In Conclusion:
While I have advocated preplanning your funeral for years, I finally took my own advice and committed funding for myself and my husband. It was actually fun to do this while we are healthy and active – no death staring us in the face. If we can do this and live to talk about it, you can too.
The moral here is that you can be prepared for your own funeral without having to spend your children’s inheritance. You can reduce stress and conflict, save money, and help your loved ones hold a “good goodbye.”
If you’re serious about taking care of business (like Elvis), visit several funeral homes and shop BEFORE you drop.
Gail Rubin, Certified Thanatologist and The Doyenne of Death®, is a pioneering death educator who uses humor, film clips and outside-the-box activities to get people to prepare for end-of-life issues. She’s the author of three books on planning for our guaranteed mortality, creator of The Newly-Dead Game®, and will release the Before I Die Festival in a Box® in fall of 2022. Visit www.AGoodGoodbye.com and download a free planning form, or purchase a copy of A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die. You can also subscribe to her podcast, The Doyenne of Death®.
Academy Guest Blogger
American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys, Inc.
9444 Balboa Avenue, Suite 300
San Diego, California 92123
Phone: (858) 453-2128
www.aaepa.com
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