funeral plans

Endgame

9 December 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral plans, Plan your own funeral, pre-need plans, Secular approaches to death

Interesting, isn’t it, how myopically self-absorbed people become when glancing forward to their demise. “Stick me in a binbag and put me out with the rubbish,” they say, men mostly. It’s right up there now in the top ten death clichés alongside “He’s gone to a better place,” “It’s only a shell,” and “She will be missed” – that passive verb really bugs me. (Do people really say to the parents of a dead child “You can always have another one”?)

Ask people who want to be bagged and binned if that would be good enough for their closest family members and the tune changes bigtime. But it doesn’t change the way they feel about themselves. “Nope, stick me in a binbag,” they conclude with ne’er a thought for the feelings of those charged with the bagging and binning.

Some of these people have made wills. It’s not as if they’ve completely suspended all consideration for others. And you can see why they might feel this way. It’s an existential chess move. Reaper G negates you: you negate him. Neat. Where grave thy victory?

Except that it’s not actually a plan, it’s just braggadocio. Hot air.

You could argue that we’ve become so individualistic, so narcissistic, that we have no interest in making plans for any party we shan’t be able to attend, but I think that’s wide of the mark.

The point is that this zero sum approach to corpse disposal is stupidly unhelpful. This is something you can only plan in collaboration with, and in deference to, those closest to you because, dammit, they’re the ones who are going to be lumbered with your deadweight. If ever there’s an event which requires us urgently and sensitively to give precedence to the feelings of others, this is it.

Why do our funeral plan designers not stress this? Well, it would complicate things, wouldn’t it? It would mean that people would have to talk about it, which they wouldn’t, the plan would never get written, nor (here’s the point) the accompanying cheque.

Over in the US, where they’re ahead of us in funeral trends, Funeralwise.com, a funeral planning website, has just published a survey which reveals that a startling 31 per cent of Americans don’t want a funeral (a figure that rises to 37 per cent for the over 75s). Bad news for undertakers, perhaps. Far worse news for families. As Funeralwise.com co-founder Larry Anspach rightly points out: “At the very least, families need to discuss their funeral preferences. Its okay to not want a funeral, but have you considered the impact on family and friends?”

See the full results of the Funeralwise.com survey here.

funeralcomparison.co.uk

11 November 2010
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral plans, independent funeral directors, pre-need plans

A reader has written to me to draw my attention to funeralcomparison.co.uk. Is it, he asks, a scam?

I’d not come across it before. If you go to the site you’ll find that it enables you to, in their words, “find the exact funeral requirements you require in-line with your budget. You can search from over 3500 independent funeral companies and you receive an estimated cost and what you services you would typically receive within 60 seconds through our site.

In your time of need it is the single location for you to easily find everything you need with regards to the funeral arrangements. Funeral comparison gives you the user the power to decide what you want, without having to ask the awkward questions like how much will it cost, we will break down the list of services you require and then you can choose the funeral director that best fits your needs.”

Well, it’s not the most literate website I’ve ever read, that’s for sure. What else?

“We deal with all Independent Funeral companies* in the UK as we feel the quality commitment empathy and care that comes from independent funeral companies is greater, and best for you in your time of need.”

I wonder what that little asterisk after Funeral companies means. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

I spent some time playing with the search box and came across all manner of Funeral companies that aren’t independent as we know it. Go to Bury St Edmunds, for example, and you’ll be directed to Fulcher and F Clutterham and Son. They are both branches of Dignity.

How is funeralcomparison making its money, you wonder? “We work closely with independent Funeral Directors and charge a small finders fee for the services we provide via our website.”

Enough. I’m out of patience.

Anyone got anything nice to say about it?

Head-in-noose funeral plans

9 November 2010
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral plans

There was a good and much-needed hatchet job on whole-life insurance in the Daily Mail last month:

Funeral plans aggressively advertised to older people – often during daytime TV ads – have been exposed as a raw deal.

More than 4.5 million people hold these plans — otherwise known as whole of life policies — which pay out a guaranteed lump sum on death.

Firms try to tempt customers with ‘free’ gifts from pens and carriage clocks to M&S vouchers. But many will end up paying more in premiums than the policy will pay out and would have been better off using a savings account.

One of the most popular plans is promoted by chat show host Sir Michael Parkinson. He has been the face of Axa Sun Life’s Guaranteed Over 50 Plan for two years.

It pays out a guaranteed lump sum on death to cover funeral expenses and other costs. A key attraction is there is no medical and it guarantees to accept anyone aged between 50 and 85.

It also comes with a car satellite navigation system, flatscreen TV or pocket camcorder, plus £25 M&S vouchers.

Some experts question whether any of these funeral plans, offered by firms such as the Co-op, Aviva and LV= are a good deal unless you’re in very poor health.

You’d have to live to only 75 with the Axa plan before you would have paid in more in premiums than the guaranteed payout. The average life expectancy of a man is 78 and 82 for women. With the best-paying policy for a 50-year-old male — Engage Mutual — you’d have to live to 83 before you’ve paid in more than you’ll get out.

But you’d still be far better off in a savings account.

700,000 people have been duped the Axa plan. Extraordinary how the contemplation of death suspends the critical faculties. The contemplation of Parky, too.

The labourer is worthy his/her hire

5 November 2010
Charles
25 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral cost, funeral plans

While I was well out of it last week on my guano-spattered rock set in a silver sea, the militant wing of this blog’s readership did a number on Lovingly Managed. It seems to have ended in either mutual exasperation or bewilderment. Probably a bit of both. Heavy breathing, for sure.

Perhaps the greatest dialectical damage was wrought by Rupert with a deadly weapon requisitioned from the Marxists. He epitomised the views of the anti-LovinglyManaged camp when he accused LM of commodification. Commodification, let me remind you, is taking something commonly offered for nothing and charging for it – helping blind people cross the road, for example. Gloriamundi echoed this: “I think there’s a need for objective, up-to-date low-cost or free advice and information on how to proceed when someone dies, before FDs, Lovingly Managed, or people like me, get anywhere near the bereaved. A service not a business.”

To all appearances this was a battle between altruism and avarice. But I’m not so sure that it was. I think that the three businesslike, intelligent and vocation-driven women behind Lovingly Managed could be earning a heck of a lot more doing something that brings them much less satisfaction.

One thing I am pretty certain of, though, is that altruism isn’t necessarily the force for good that it may, dare I say, self-righteously reckon itself to be.

There is a widespread, kindly belief in the funeral industry that bereaved are too easily exploited and must be considered exempt from market forces. This prompts two questions:

What then is a fair rate for the job?

What is the effect of low pay on levels of service?

The upside of things as they are is that the industry attracts a great many damn fine people who value service to fellow men and women way above the slavering pursuit of fast-moving consumer goods.

The downside is that it also attracts well-meaning do-gooders of questionable value but unjustifiably high self-worth.

And while some bereaved people need to be treated incredibly carefully and kindly, others do not, because they can look after themselves. While we’re about it, let’s not underestimate the responsibility that the bereaved have for themselves, because that’s a responsibility no one else can shoulder.

Kindness isn’t always as kind as it looks. The bereaved must not be patronised, infantilised or kept helpless by those whose apparent altruism masks dark neediness and other baleful if not barking psychological issues. Definitively not among these is any member of the militant wing of the GFG commentariat.

Vocation will always be a more valuable qualification in this industry than greed. For all that, nice guys famously don’t win ball games and they’re not winning this one. It is the greedy undertakers who are winning the battle for market share with their aggressive selling of financial products, funeral plans and their latest magic trick, the standardised quirky, individualised funeral. It’s called commoditisation and its outcome ought to be falling prices – but things are rarely economically orthodox in the death business.

As things stand, I am not aware of florists, printers or caterers pulling their punches financially with the bereaved. Undertakers do just about all right in a market depressed both by many punters’ low expectations of a funeral and also by an oversupply of undertakers. I am aware of many undertakers who could charge more, but don’t. I’m not going into grief counselling because I know almost nothing about it.

It’s secular celebrants I worry about. Financial rewards in this sector are terribly low for those who put in the time and care a good funeral needs. And of all jobs in the funeral industry, this one calls for especially high levels of a range of qualities which include emotional intelligence, literacy and performance skills – a rare combination.

Those who possess these qualifications can work for good money in the real world. Some, like Gloriamundi, are happy to work as a celebrant for the prevailing low rate for reasons which he/she gives over at her/his blog. Some are able to fund their habit with another income stream – a pension, often. This is a job you need to be able to afford to do if you’re going to do it properly.

Which is why many potential celebrants calculate the hourly rate, find they’d be better off at B & Q, then go do something else. Lost to the cause.

Up in Leeds OneLife Ceremonies, a mother and daughter team, have just launched their new website. I like these two a lot, they have energy, intelligence and spirit – they’re a cut above. They are looking to make a living out of celebrancy of all sorts, and why not? We need them. Having costed things carefully and not avariciously they have arrived at a fee for a funeral of a perfectly fair £275. Are they going to get any work at that rate? You tell me.

So here’s my proposition. Those celebrants who are presently undervaluing themselves financially are devaluing celebrancy by deterring good people from entering. By doing so they are leaving the door open for those of lower calibre who race about doing too far many funerals for their own good or anybody else’s. This is the inexorable Law of the Lowest Common Denominator.

Like any industry, the death industry only works well if people get paid properly.

It’s what she would have wanted

4 November 2010
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, death and funerals, End-of-life issues, funeral plans, funeral poetry

Here’s a new poem by Wendy Cope published in the current Spectator. I hope she’ll forgive the flagrant breach of copyright and see this instead as a promo. Its sentiments are very contemporary.

My Funeral

I hope I can trust you, friends, not to use our relationship

As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip.

I have seen enough of them at funerals and they make me cross.

At this one, though deceased, I aim to be the boss.

If you are asked to talk about me for five minutes, please do not go on for eight

There is a strict timetable at the crematorium and nobody wants to be late

If invited to read a poem, just read the bloody poem. If requested

To sing a song, just sing it, as suggested,

And don’t say anything. Though I will not be there,

Glancing pointedly at my watch and fixing the speaker with a malevolent stare,

Remember that this was how I always reacted

When I felt that anybody’s speech, sermon or poetry reading was becoming too protracted.

Yes, I was intolerant, and not always polite

And if there aren’t many people at my funeral, it will serve me right.

Making the best of old age

24 August 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral plans

On a slow news day, I quite enjoyed this piece by Jane Miller in my favourite newspaper:

Many of us have been possessed at times by thoughts that the life we are living is not the real one, but some botched job we somehow fell into, provisionally as it were, fine for the time being, until we’ve decided what we really want to be or do.

Old age certainly sorts that out for us. Saying to yourself that this is it, all it was ever going to be, has its consolations, allowing us to shed the frustrations of a lifetime of try-outs.

…

In Coda, the book written by playwright-Simon Gray when he was dying of lung cancer, he ended one chapter with the words: ‘I wish there were a way of just dissolving in the sea, without having to go through the business of drowning first.’

I like that idea, but my absence from my own death and my own funeral robs both of a good deal of interest. My funeral is not, after all, a family occasion I shall be required to organise. And what will be the point of it, anyway, if I’m not at it and in a position to check who has made the effort to turn up and who has not?

Read it all here

Robbing the dead while they’re still alive

10 March 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral plans, pre-need plans

Consumers are best served by people whose interests are their interests – people who want what their customers want. Ethics-driven natural burial ground operators are a good example. This is an equation, so it works the other way around.

There’s not much understanding of this in the funeral industry. There are shining exceptions, but their example is seldom spotlighted. I’m thinking here of a big business like AW Lymn which goes out of its way to trade transparently and join up arranging a funeral to conducting it. I am thinking of AB Walker, a business old enough and sufficiently well thought of not to give a stuff when this blog criticises it, but which extended the hand of friendship and listened to what I said with astonishing good cheer and magnanimity. I am thinking, too, of businesses like Bristol South Funeral Services whom I visited yesterday. They’re minnows, a new start-up. If people knew just how lovely they are, let me tell you, they’d be swamped.

Perhaps it is because the funeral industry has been subjected to so little consumer scrutiny that honour, ethics and excellence, unsung, have gone unrewarded. Result? Too many funeral directors have lost their consumer focus. They seem to be more interested in each other, actually. In the absence of healthy competition there is, often, morbid, rabid mutual loathing of an intensity which would surprise and revolt you. Where the best are not singled out for praise and reward by consumer advocates (I hope I’ll soon be joined by many others), open, healthy competition for market share can turn into a very nasty, underhand turf war in which the interests of consumers are confounded. Funeral directors are united by nothing so much as a perceived threat to their business. Here’s an example. The prospect of people conducting home funerals, if reckoned realistic, will, I’ll put my house on it, bring some local groups together like a bag of rats for just long enough to agree to deny these people any help. I shall highlight the first case as soon as I hear of it. Perhaps I just have.

The most egregious example of turf war at its most clamorous, ugly, bloody, nasty, underhand and atrocious is that of the marketing of funeral plans. The consumer hears nothing of the clamour, only the sweet siren songs of helpful plan providers playing both to the finer feelings of decent, thoughtful folk who want to die with everything in order, and to their terror of steeply rising costs (32.8 per cent in the last five years). There’s a big, big question mark over this latter claim. In the words of one of my correspondents, “If we look at the elements of a cremation, typically costing £2500 now, around 28-30% (£700) goes in cremation and doctors fees. So if the rest of the charges (due to the funeral director) go up by 3% pa (about the rate of inflation), for five years, that £1800 will rise to £2086. So for the Dignity prediction to be true, that funerals will cost £4,000 by 2015, that means the price of the cremation and doctors fees will have to rise to nearly £2000! This is clearly nonsense (or the reason why Dignity is buying crematoria!)”

The opening shots in this war were fired, I think, by the disgraced Service Corporation International (now, as the result of a management buyout, Dignity, and no longer scandal ridden). So effectively have Dignity and The Co-operative Group sold their plans and cornered future market share that consumer choice in the future is under the gravest threat. The independents are fighting back, but they can’t risk taking hits and already some are complaining that they are having to honour plans made 15 years ago for no profit. The winners will be the The Co-op and Dignity, whose prices are currently higher than most independents, who do not, generally, offer the same level of personal service and, in the case of The Co-operative, is gravely susceptible to negligence and malpractice.

Do these plans offer anything like value for money? In the words of my correspondent: “If you buy the Co-op plan over 5 years, the total cost of their mid plan rises from £2825 (already nearly £300 above the cost of an average funeral – the Golden Charter mid plan is £2549) to £3825 (another 6% + pa), so the customer is actually paying for the projected price rise themselves!”

Does an insurance scheme offer better value? We now hear of insurance companies who will pay out only to funeral directors who will bung them £250 first. There’s no shortage of scavengers picking the pockets of the dead.

Every funeral plan sold denies those responsible for arranging a funeral their choice of funeral director; every plan sold is a nail in the coffin of breadth of choice. What seems to be the consumer’s friend is in fact the consumer’s enemy.

If independent funeral directors were governed by the best interests of their clients they would call this war off – because there’s an equation at stake here. Instead, they are drumming up their own destruction. And they won’t stop, it’s too desperate and way beyond the reach of reason, neither will charities like Age Concern (Age Concern, for heavens’ sake!!) stop promoting the Dignity plan, until we can blow a whistle loud enough and show the world a better way to pay for a funeral.

My correspondent thinks this is a case for the OFT. I suspect that this is a cause better served by consumer education. You think?

Some conflict of interest, surely?

27 January 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Co-op, funeral plans

 

Michael Parkinson
 
HM Government Dignity Ambassador for old people, and…
 
…the face behind Sun Life funeral plans, which are…
 
…Co-operative funeral plans.
 
Tut tut.

Costing the dead

9 September 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral plans

I think we all buy into the notion that capitalism is a species of altruism, only more caring. So it comes as no surprise to discover that Sun Life Direct, vendor of financial services to the over 50s, cares like mad about us—all of us, not just on-the-way-out over 50s.

They’ve just commissioned research from Mintel which shows that funeral costs are rising (gasp) (nothing else is?) and that most people do not make provision for their funerals, either financially or by sketching out the sort of farewell they’d like. The’ve notified the newspapers of this by sending them a helpful press release.

Time was when journalists used to get off their backsides and find out what was really going on. Now they squash them into office chairs, wait for the press releases to roll in, pick out the ones they like, overcook them a bit and send them out looking like news. So it is that Rebecca Smithers in today’s Guardian writes about funeral costs “soaring” (aaarrgh!!) and informs us that even “Environmentally friendly funerals are, perhaps surprisingly, more expensive than traditional burials because of the expense of custom-made wicker caskets.”

Tcha!

She goes on to tell us what Mark Howes, caring managing director of Sun Life, thinks about this:

“As funeral prices are predicted to increase, it’s important that people think about putting the right provisions in place. Sharing your funeral preferences with loved ones can be particularly emotional and understandably this is a topic most of us would prefer not to talk about. But organising a funeral can be extremely stressful and painful, without the added worry of not being able to cover the costs.”

It’s anxiety raising stuff. Oh my god (headless chicken impression) can Sun Life help me?!

Yes, they can. They can sell me a pay-now-die-later funeral plan. Phew! And, best of all, I will be able to go into that good night knowing that my mortal remains will be borne to their final resting place by … … Co-operative Bloody Funeralcare.

It’s a devilish plan!

Instead of regurgitating her press release with hyperbolic colour added, Ms Smithers might have served her readers better by stripping away some of the secrets and lies surrounding these funeral plans and the methods used to sell them. She might have discovered that the NAFD rumbles itself in this matter. It recommends Perfect Choice plans to its membership as

“the perfect tool for your business … Designed FOR funeral directors BY working funeral directors.”

Er, not much customer focus there.

Ms Smithers might even have made the discovery that, for an undertaker, a funeral plan buys tomorrow’s customer today. And that what’s lending stridency to their sales pitch is that there’s an ugly, bloody turf war going on out there. The big conglomerates, Dignity and Effcare, are selling pre-need plans at a rate which threatens, come the near future, to throttle the life out of the independents.

People have been making provision for their funerals since time immemorial. What they have never done is prescribe how their families will feel about their deaths. But Golden Charter has a way of addressing this:

“Consideration for others is the most frequent reason for buying a Golden Charter funeral plan. With Golden Charter you know that your loved ones will be spared some of the burden of bereavement.”

Oh yeah?

No, this is just another fine way of disconnecting grievers from farewelling their dead in the way they’d wish.

“You’ll have specified every detail of the funeral in advance, selected the funeral director and made provision for the costs.”

Not all the costs, actually, not by any means. And so far as my own demise is concerned, choice of funeral director is 100% a matter for those who kindly take it upon themselves to dispose of me. I won’t care. I’ll be dead.

Whatever goods and chattels I bequeath to my heirs, a funeral plan will not be one of them.

Jonathan Taylor’s funeral preferences

1 September 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral plans

Jonathan Taylor is an independent funeral celebrant in Totnes, and an occasional funeral arranger and conductor for green fuse. That’s not all he is, of course. There’s a lot more to Jonathan. He’s got a literary side, for example, and refers to one of his short stories in what follows.

Everyone’s funeral wishes are different. Probably the knack is to get the weight of them right, expectationwise. Too prescriptive you end up telling people how to feel.

You can tell that Jonathan is an industry insider. His funeral wishes give an insight into it.


MY FUNERAL PREFERENCES

I know that families’ dearest wish for a dead person’s funeral is to do “what he would have wanted.” What I want is for my funeral to be the way you want it for me; so as you know, these are my preferences:

I haven’t left a will because there’s no money whatever in my ‘estate’ – hah! (though you can have my car and laptop and anything else you can find if you’re a friend or relative, work it out between you, just get there before any official person does, don’t wait for a decent interval) – so don’t pay any professional for anything at all that you are able and willing to do yourselves, especially not a funeral director or celebrant because we’re expensive. That includes handling, transporting, preparing and storing my dead body (you can use someone’s living room or garage if they’ll let you, take plenty of dry ice to stop it smelling), making its shroud (or coffin), digging and filling in its grave, using a venue (see if you can find a willing café owner), conducting a ceremony for me, and anything else that needs doing. Funerals are a piece of piss, believe me, so don’t get your knickers in a twist about anything, take your time and figure it out together. Particularly, in case anyone wonders, please don’t ask a humanist to officiate because they have their own reasons for wanting to conduct funerals. (And if a funeral director or someone arranges a vicar behind your back by some horrendous misunderstanding, refuse to pay their bill, dig my body up and do it again properly.)

Ideally, I’d like nature to deal with my remains, which means their being left out for the animals and insects to make good use of. In practice, that’s not likely to be legal; but if you can bury my body on private land in a shallow enough grave to turn it into compost (use worm compost to fill the grave if you can), do your best – Sam might know where there’s a field somewhere. I’d rather it wasn’t cremated because its crushed bones (‘ashes’) will still be a disposal problem, and they don’t seem to me to have much significance after they’ve been through the industrial process of a cremator – but again, suit yourselves. (If you go that way, balloon them – ask Ash!)

For my ceremony, if you want one, be as informal as possible. Some of you have read my story, ‘The Wrong Side of the Sky’, and that tells you all you need to know; in fact you can read it out if you like, rather than a poem unless it’s one of mine (top drawer in my filing cabinet). You can play Shel Silverstein’s ‘Have Another Espresso’ from his 1963 album ‘Inside Folk Songs’ (Jenny at World Music & Video can get it, £16). I’ll come back and haunt anyone who turns up in anything other than their work clothes, or who shows any contrived respect for the occasion. Think of it as going for a cup of coffee with me, and take it from there. Above all, I’d like my body to be taken to the ceremony and on to the grave in a works vehicle of some kind such as a van, certainly not a hearse unless it’s someone’s classic toy. Some of you can ride in the back with my corpse if you like.

Gather close round my grave and play Pink Floyd’s ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ at full volume when you settle my coffin (I love that lady who sings on it, she’s got guts), and join in the words. You’re going to miss me and it will hurt like hell, and you’ll need each other, so yell and scream and let each other know about it, it’s okay with me. I’ll miss you too.

Lots of love,