Author: Charles

I’m off to buy a telly. I’ve done my comparison shopping on the internet (it’s what we do, isn’t it?) and (since you ask) tracked the cheapest to Makro. Good deals on just now. Get down there.

Would that I could do the same if I were shopping for a funeral—with some honourable exceptions. AW Lymn is one (their brochure is simply outstanding). Allcock’s is another.

It is useful here to compare the situation in the UK with that in the US. Over there, where funeral directors are far more rapacious than ours, they have, since 1984, been regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Funeral Rule. They must give you a General Price List (GPL) with itemised prices for goods and services. You can pick and choose.

It’s a good thing—up to a point. But there is one charge which is non-declinable: the basic services fee. This covers those funeral directors’ professional services which are common to most arrangements. It includes looking after the body, arranging the funeral, doing the paperwork, and it bundles a charge for overheads – heat, light, maintenance of premises, etc.

The Funeral Rule has made it possible for people in the US to comparison shop and decline goods and services they don’t want. Americans can buy a bargain price casket at Costco and evade the funeral director’s markup. You can’t do that in the UK.

Have funerals got cheaper in the US as a result? No, they have climbed steadily. How so? Because funeral directors have upped their basic services fee (cue: Doh!)

This penalises those people who care for their own after death and are their own funeral director. Whatever minimal services they may require from a funeral director, they must pay the full basic services fee. You may like to read this post by the excellent Holly Stevens on the matter.

Here in the UK funeral directors charge what they call a professional fee for providing essentially the same services covered by the US basic services fee. As in the US, it is fixed. If, therefore, you want to arrange a complex funeral which will involve the funeral director in hours of extra work, the likelihood is that he or she has no means of charging you for those extra hours. You will pay a not a penny more than the undemanding client who makes all their funeral arrangements in twenty minutes and isn’t seen again until the day of the funeral.

Just in case that sounds like good value, consider this: your funeral director has no financial incentive whatever to give you any extra time you need.

And let’s not overlook the fact that the undemanding client who takes up very little time inevitably subsidises those who take up lots. That client could be you.

Most funeral directors ‘bury’ some of their professional fee in the goods and services they sell you—hence the absurd mark-ups on coffins. Most of them, therefore, cannot afford not to charge you for any services you don’t want. If you want to reduce your costs and, say, tell your funeral director that you will not need his or her bearers to carry the coffin , and ask how much that will be off the bill, the likely reply will be that bearers are not charged separately, they are included in the professional fee.

In the days when all funerals were pretty much the same, a fixed professional fee was regarded as unobjectionable. What’s more, our UK funeral directors have not bigged themselves up into a secular priesthood as they have in the US, neither are they as greedy or objectionable.

But on the one hand the increasing personalisation of funerals is causing the funeral director’s role as event organiser to grow—as is the role of professional funeral event organisers like Sentiment. On the other hand, the growth of the home funeral movement is causing the funeral director’s role, both as event organiser and custodian of the body, to shrink. The one-size-fits-all professional fee is incapable of covering the demands of such a wide variety of funeral clients. As funerals evolve, the professional fee looks increasingly inexact and lacking in transparency. It certainly discriminates against those who would, for whatever reason, unpick the funeral director’s job description and carry out some of those tasks themselves. 

Greater flexibility is called for. It’s time to do away with the professional fee.

How do funeral directors achieve this and still remain profitable? If they’re any good they deserve to be. And let us never make the silly mistake of equating low cost with good value. So, what on earth can they possibly put in its place?

The solution is, actually, perfectly simple. Funeral directors must do what everybody else does, from jobbing gardeners to swanky lawyers.

Charge an hourly rate. 

Whether or not funerals are too expensive depends on how much money you’ve got and how you like to spend it. Some like to say it with a Batesville casket, mountains of flowers, a fleet of vintage Bentleys, prancing horses, a military band, the Red Arrows—the sky’s the limit. If you’ve got lots of dough to blow and, therewith, administer a little fiscal stimulus to some local service providers, that would seem to be wholly unobjectionable.

Others prefer something simpler. Of those, a significant proportion urgently need something simpler. If you are jobless and skint, no disgrace in times like these, the Social Fund will pay up to £700 towards the cost of a funeral. But you can’t get a mainstream funeral at anything like that price. The average cost of a simple funeral is £1050 and that doesn’t include disbursements, which will eat up £500+. You’ll be paying off the balance for what will feel like eternity. The Social Fund will only cough up after the funeral. No wonder so many undertakers are refusing to take on clients who need to apply to it. They think they may never get paid.

What advice for such as you?

First, understand that you can accomplish the really important purposes of a funeral for very little. The most important part of the process, the farewell ceremony, needn’t cost you a penny. Do it yourself.

Second, get rid of the trappings: the hearse, the cars, the banks of flowers. Does this mean doing away with dignity? Of course not. Dignity is how you behave, not stuff you rent.

What’s going to cost? The burial or cremation will cost a few bob. Cremation is a lot cheaper. For that, you’ll have to stump up roughly £350-450 to the crematorium plus £147 for two doctors to pronounce your dead person dead. You’ll probably want to buy a coffin, though you could just wrap your dead person in a shroud of some sort. A coffin on ebay will set you back just £115 + £20 delivery. You’ll need a suitable vehicle to take your dead person to the place of disposal. Say goodbye to £700. Show a finger to the Social Fund.

There’s paperwork to do. No problem there. And there’s the small problem of what to do with the body while you wait for the funeral.

Most hospitals will keep a body in their mortuary for nothing if a person dies in the hospital. Some will even do the same for someone who has died at home. The alternative is to bring the body home, but the problem here is keeping it cool enough to delay decomposition. You can do your best, and screw the coffin lid down so as to keep any bad smells inside. But you may think it safer, if the hospital will not cooperate, to ask a funeral director to do all this. You will almost certainly find an independent funeral director to let you use their fridge (the bigger firms just aren’t geared to it). This may cost you up to £25 a day.

On the day of the funeral, drive down to the hospital or the funeral director with your ebay coffin, pop your dead person inside, and off you go.

It’s an unconventional way of proceeding, for sure. Will your crematorium, hospital or, if you use one, funeral director treat you as if you were a bungling amateur and a bloody nuisance? Absolutely not. It’s a heartwarming fact, the sort of discovery that restores your faith in human nature, that most crematoriums can’t do enough for you. The same goes for hospital mortuaries where a small (customary) consideration, £10-20, will earn you yet more goodwill. Even funeral directors (the smaller the better) will put themselves out for you. You really will be supported every inch of the way.

Not spending more than you have is vital. If you are brave and hardworking you can save £1,000 you never had and create a really meaningful, memorable funeral. When it’s all over you may, because you courageously rolled your sleeves up, experience a species of satisfaction that the Red Arrows could never have given you. The same goes if you could have afforded it, but preferred to engage rather than outsource.