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Dying is an expensive business
My father passed away a couple of days ago (He was 81, and with 5 long, bad weeks in hospital, it was a relief to see him finally find peace) which gave me my first experience of funeral homes.
As an only child, I took Mum with me to get the arrangements done while we were both still in that initial state of shock. I got a lot more shocked by the time we'd finished !
Dad had the foresight to invest in a "Basic Direct Committal" - he was a very spiritual but not-at-all religious person, so he had the most cut-price of everything. He just wanted the resulting ashes spread on his favourite spot on the farm. He would have had himself rolled into a hole at home if it wasn't so complex to organise legally !
He set the funeral fund up 3 years ago with an 'investment' of $2,650. At that point the funeral directors offered a fixed price guarantee at that $2,650 or the 'variable' option for the service at $2,100, which would leave the balance available to mum at the end. Unfortunately he chose the variable price option (presumably he'd not expected any events likely to cause a major price rise, and thought mum might like to buy a few bottles so we could all toast his life, with the leftovers).
In 3 years, his investment had grown to a fairly unimpressive $2,900 (I say unimpressive as I assume the funeral people have it invested somewhere doing better than a few percent per annum). However, the fees themselves had risen from the expected $2,100 to $3,500. The 'salesman' asked mum and I if we understood all the costs, and I said sure we did, but I could guarantee him there was some fairly unholy language being directed at him by Dad from the other side.
As there is no ceremony (we will have our own at home), the funeral people only needed to pick dad's body up from the hospital 2km away, place the body in a coffin, and take the body across the road to the crematorium. The fee for this part alone is $1,850 (up from $900 on his initial variable price quote). I will never again complain about another professional's fee ! The rest of the costs are crematorium, paperwork etc. In the end, after minor "unders and overs", Mum was required to fund an extra $450, which fortunately she was able to do (of course we would have done it for her, but it was important for her to see Dad's plans actioned from what he had proudly left in place for her).
If it wasn't so insignificant in the grander scheme of things, I'd be pretty angry. With daytime TV on the last couple of days, I noticed there are also plenty of spruikers for "funeral plans" - I never absorbed them before we needed to use one.
I assume most of these funds operate similarly, and if we want to leave something aside to ensure our loved ones can see us off with no further worries, we should invest a basic sum between $3,000 - $5,000 in today's money in some sort of conservative on-call investment, and that would be better than handing it over into a 'funeral plan'. That of course assumes the burial industry doesn't jack prices up by more than we can achieve in compounding interest from any investment. No idea what justifies 100% fee increase in 3 years or whether it would happen again industry-wide - and of course there's no such thing as price-fixing !
Just thought I would share that experience as most of us will need to go there at some time or another.
At least the old bloke is at rest now, but his focus on the pennies, and anger at people who try to take advantage of him, lives on as a legacy ;-)
Cheers
Carl
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Where are we going ? And what am I doing in this handbasket ??
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