How to do a Funeral Preplan

Nobody wants to think about his or her own death, but it’s one of the most important things that you can discuss with your family. Death is inevitable. It’s something that we all have to face at some point.

After you pass away, your family could be left with thousands of dollars of expenses from the funeral, as well as the emotional strain of having to make important decisions about laying you to rest. Preplanning your funeral can take both the financial burden and the emotional stress off of your loved ones by detailing your wishes and paying for the funeral expense ahead of time.

If you’re looking to plan a funeral, there are dozens of different factors that you’ll need to consider to offset some of the decisions that your family will have to make.

What are your Final Wishes?

There are some obvious big issues that you’ll need to decide first, like what do you want to be done with your body after you pass away. Do you want to be buried or cremated? Do you want your body donated to science? If you’re cremated, do you want the ashes kept in an urn or do you want them to spread over one of your favorite vacation spots? There are dozens of different of options for your final resting place.

Every year there are devastated families that lost a loved one. While they are going through the grieving period and the emotional strain, they are forced to make difficult decisions about how to lay their loved ones to rest. The wrestle with all of the different options and spend weeks or months worried about if they made the wrong decisions or went against the final wishes of their family members. Don’t let your loved ones go through this strain.

Finding a Funeral Director or DIY

The are two different ways that you can preplan for your funeral. You can enlist the help of a professional funeral director, or you can make the big decisions yourself and outline your final wishes with a document that your loved ones can keep track of. There is no “right” way to preplan your own funeral, but a word of caution, there is A LOT of decisions for you to make. A lot of them you probably wouldn’t think of, which is why a professional funeral director can be extremely beneficial during this process.

If you’re going to use a director, you’ll need to head to a funeral home that you know and trust. The director can help you plan everything from start to beginning. They will be able to guide you through the whole process of making any arrangements, buying a plot, and any other final decisions that you’ll need to make. Having the assistance of a funeral director can make the process go much smoother and ensure that you don’t forget to make any of the major decisions that could weigh on your family after your passing.

Even if you decide to be cremated, you can still work with a funeral director for the memorial service and they can assist you with while working with the cremation professionals.

The Finances

Aside from the emotional strain of having to make those final decisions, you family will also be left with significant financial burdens after your passing if you don’t plan ahead for the inevitable. The traditional funeral costs around $7,000, but it’s common for all of the final expenses to quickly reach $10,000. These bills can be difficult for a family to cover unexpectedly. One of the best ways to offset these costs is to plan ahead for them and soften the financial blow.

There are several different ways that you can protect your family from all of the hidden expenses after you pass away. One way is to do a prepay funeral with an individual funeral home, like the one you used to plan for the funeral. You can make payments or give the funeral home one lump sum of money, and they will use that money to pay for any expenses once you pass away. This is a common way that people avoid leaving their loved ones with thousands of dollars of funeral bills. This is basically just paying for all of the goods and services before you actually need them. The funeral home will be able to crunch the numbers after your planning and tell you how much everything will cost (service, cemetery plot, etc., you write them a check, and now your funeral arrangement is paid for.

There is one major pitfall of prepaying for your funeral directly through the funeral home, there are some chances that your loved ones would still end up paying for expenses out of pocket. There could be a few changes, like inflation, that makes the funeral more expensive than when you originally planned the funeral. Maybe your family decides to make a few minor tweaks, and they will have to pay for those themselves. Maybe the funeral home goes out of business after you prepaid for the services. In those cases, your family would bear the full responsibility of paying for your final resting place.

Another way that you can give you loved ones the money that they need is by purchasing a burial insurance policy through an insurance company.  These policies have several advantages that aren’t offered through prepaying through a funeral home.

These plans are sold through private insurance companies and operate just like a traditional life insurance policy.

The first benefit to these types of policies is that you aren’t limited to the specific funeral home. With these pre-need insurance policies, you can use the money from the policy at any funeral home, or for any other expenses that could arise after your passing. You aren’t limited to the particular funeral home.

Another benefit is it allows you to get excellent coverage for little investment. In most cases, these plans are much cheaper than applicants think, and it’s a great way to provide peace of mind to your loved ones against any other small debts that you would leave behind.

Getting Affordable Burial Insurance

There are dozens of different insurance companies on the market that offer burial insurance plans that you can choose from. Each company is going to have a different system for calculating their premium costs, which means that you could receive drastically varying premiums from two companies. There are going to be several different factors that the insurance companies uses to determine how much you’ll pay for your final expense insurance.

The major important factor is going to be how much coverage that you buy. It’s vital that you get enough coverage without paying for more insurance than you need. If you have a pre-planned funeral, you’ll at least have an idea of how much it will cost for all the goods and services. Make sure that preneed life insurance policy is large enough to pay for all of those costs.

The company is also going to look at your age to help determine how much you’ll pay for your insurance policy. The older that you are, the more that you’re going to pay for your coverage. If you want to save money, it’s better to purchase one of these plans sooner than later.

It’s easy to see why you should compare quotes from dozens of companies before you choose the one that works best for you.

Our agents can help you do that without wasting time talking on the phone to dozens of agents and answering the same questions over and over. Unlike traditional insurance agents, we represent dozens of companies across the Untied States, we can help connect you to the perfect burial insurance plan to give your family the money they need to get through the difficult time of losing you.

Summary

Losing a loved one is never going to be easy, but having the entire funeral service planned before can make it much easier. You don’t want to add any additional stress to your family that could be avoided with a little planning beforehand.

These conversations with your loved ones probably aren’t going to be easy, but they are some of the most important discussions that you’ll ever have.

If you have any questions about funeral pre-planning or about burial insurance policies, please contact one of our agents today. We would be happy to answer any questions that you have and ensure that your family has the protection that they need.