funeral cost

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.

You couldn’t make it up. The Express could, perhaps, given its record for libelling people. Here is the essence of their story in today’s paper.

First, the headline: Three Orphans Sell Pets To Pay For Mum’s Funeral.

Got yer pulse racing? It’s right up there on a par with Headless Waiter Found In Topless Bar (New York Post).

Troy, 17, Rory, 15, and Alice, 14, are flogging all they’ve got to raise £2,500 for the funeral of their mum. “The youngsters have so far raised £525 by selling their beloved spaniels Peggy, Minnie and Sammy – for which they got a total of £250 – and some furniture from their council house in Whittlesey, Cambs.” Next to go is the Xbox. Troy says “We can’t face mum having a pauper’s funeral. We’re not asking for a lavish affair but she deserves a few flowers and a nice send-off.”

The funeral directors insist on having the money upfront. They offered to knock 200 quid off by squeezing the body into a smaller coffin, but the kids refused.

Enough!

What a shame it is that the people who feel duty-bound to spend more than they can afford on a funeral are so often those who can least afford it. No one calls those middle-class, cardboard coffin funerals paupers’ funerals.

Read the whole sorry story here — if you can bear.

The effects of the crash have yet fully to register. Brits have always had a puritanical, penitential streak, a disposition to pare cheese, save string, make do and mend. Those who will be wiped out are to be pitied. The rest of us, I think, are strangely relieved that it’s all over, happy to get back to self-reliance and common sense. We remind ourselves that the best things in life are recession-proof. The beauties of nature outshine the thrill of the mall.

Bad news is good news for the press; our papers are making merry feeding our schadenfreude and our fear. They’ve picked up on it in the US and it’s generated this headline in Time: Corpses Pile Up Amid Britain’s Financial Crisis.

You hadn’t noticed? It goes like this. Families on benefits are encountering delays in getting Social Fund payments for their funerals. Some funeral directors, unwilling to carry debt, are refusing to go ahead with funeral arrangements until they have been paid. It has taken nine weeks to hold a funeral for a Shrewsbury man. Questions have been asked in the House. The spectre of the Winter of Discontent stalks our streets.

In point of boring fact, this situation predates the crash. It affects only 27,000 funerals a year. So the chances of a corpse pile-up in your neighbourhood are bathetically less than nil.

The hullabaloo raises interesting questions about funeral costs, though, at a time when everyone will be interested in cheaper funerals. The Social Fund will cough up around £700 towards the funeral director’s bill and around £1,000 for disbursements. In all, that’s a few hundred pounds short of the cost of a typical funeral. Need a funeral cost this much? Two factors, in particular, make funerals arguably more expensive then they ought to be.

The first is the d-word, that peculiar word we apply only to the very old and the dead: dignity. If a funeral does not feature a hearse, bearers, shop flowers atop the coffin and a be-toppered undertaker walking in front of the cortege, most people would reckon that to be shabby rather than simple. Funeral directors could offer a service that costs less than £700, but there’d be little uptake. What’s more, their pricing structures are such that they’d struggle to make a decent profit if they did.

It is interesting to see how, in the US, the huge cost of a ‘traditional’ funeral — cosmetised, casketed body, visitation, service, whole body burial in a vault — has spawned its polar opposite, direct cremation, whereby the body is cremated as soon after death as statutorily possible (usually 24 hours) and the ashes returned to the family. Thus Florida Direct Cremation can offer to transport the body, coffin it, do all the paperwork and cremate it for an all-in price of $395. In sinking, shrinking British pounds that works out at just £225.76. Most charge around $900 — £500.

Direct cremation does not preclude a funeral, but it is likely to be a funeral not for a body but for its ashes. The family chooses its venue. In the UK we are culturally conditioned to believe that a funeral for a body is indispensable. Could that change?

How much does cremating a body actually cost in terms of fuel and capital costs?  I ought to find out; perhaps a helpful person will tell me. It’s bound to be more in the UK than it is in the US because we cremate so inefficiently. And this brings me to my second factor: because a UK crematorium is both a ceremonial space in which to hold funerary rites and also a place where the dead are burned, it gets all that heat up to burn far fewer bodies than it could — a very un-green way of doing things. A US crematory will burn bodies round the clock if necessary.

The UK model doesn’t work. More time is given to dead bodies than they need, too little to mourners. The outcome looks and feels like a production line. Not for the business of cremation it isn’t.  

It would make more sense for bodies to be burned in a dedicated plant serving several ceremonial spaces. Given the lack of interest most people show in what happens after the curtains close, it would seem to be immaterial if a body is burned a few feet away from the ceremonial space or a few miles. Those few who do wish to see everything through and done properly could still go and do so — as they do in the US. Sure, they would find themselves in an industrial environment, but scarcely more so than behind the scenes at a crem.

Should local authorities feel obliged to provide a ceremonial spaces? Or crematories? I can’t see why. But they’d hate to give up their crematoria because they yield good profits, which subsidise the costs of cemetery maintenance — and, therefore, of burial. In this way, local authorities are able to compete unfairly with natural burial grounds run by the private sector. They further penalise cremation clients in order to fund unrelated projects. It’s a pity many of them don’t spend a little of that money on refurbishing their crem toilets.

Vested interests oppose change. Funerals cost more than they ought.

And the funeral directors? Are they making more than they ought? No. They must comply, both, with things as they are and with the wishes of their clients. If funerals cost more than they need, that’s not their fault. Having in mind what they do, they are entitled to a decent living.

As I go to press I can’t help thinking my argument is flawed. It is reassuring to know that my loyal readers will not hesitate to pounce.