AIBU to think death is expensive.

I went to a presentation by a funeral director who was clear that coffins were essential but everything else was just family choice.

My mum paid in advance for her funeral and the only additional thing we had to pay for was a family car.
My grandad died in 1973 funeral cost £173
My dad died in 2008 funeral cost £1700
Mum died in 2009 funeral cost £3700.

Hopefully my husband and I will live a long healthy life but if we do the funeral could end up costing about £8000 and we'd be paying that out of our pension or leaving our son to pay it.
We decided to pay up front. I think you have to be over 50 to do this but both our funerals are paid for. They give you a breakdown of what is and isn't included and yes embalming isn't but neither of us want that. We also haven't included a family car . We were able to pay for it monthly over a couple of years. It's held in a separate trust so it's protected even if the company goes bust.

I suppose the question is how many of these things can be skipped or done yourself? Or is it that if you want any service at all, you're locked in to a number of others? The bereaved may well be able to dress the deceased themselves or, depending on where the person dies, transport them to the funeral home, but won't be able to embalm them themselves. From your description, coffins sound compulsory.

I think it is very expensive in this country. In my home country, not only is it cheaper, but the equivalent of NI covers up to a certain sum, so there's some support.

Certainly our medical school isn’t currently accepting any donations, as they have enough for now.

Remember with direct cremations.. no one attends and your loved ones might not like that.. it's not for everyone.

@IWantToBeASleepingCat they are dead though... I doubt they will have an opinion during the event.

I am sorry for your loss op. Years ago I think there was some kind of death benefit people could claim to help with the expenses of a death. I think it used to be around £1000. I have absolutely no idea if any such benefit still exists, who could claim it or, if it's still around, how to do so. Might be worth looking up death benefit on Government site ...or others on here might have some idea if this benefit still exists (or if it's a figment if my imagination) If I had time today I would look it up myself today but have a long day of commitments. It's a hard expense for some at a difficult time. Hope this benefit is around and that you could access it. 💐

Few places take bodies for research now as most teaching post-mortems/dissection lessons, are done via e-learning
So, it's a wonderful thing to do, but you need to sort well in advance

It's not what funeral plans for though. Funeral plans are just there for providers to make money and they usually work out even more expensive and don't always pay out if you die before finishing the payments. Saving up a lump sum is usually cheaper.

Very true. Like with all heavily branded goods and services, the cost of all those TV adverts - even if they're only on Channel 5 in the daytime, the sheer number of them mount up - is firmly baked into the price that you will be charged.

' Direct cremation ' does not have to be done with one of the companies that now advertise on TV, my local crematorium charges - £545 for an unattended direct cremation.

When the hospital rings you to tell you your relative has died, surely the cheapest option is to say "oh, that is a shame", and put the phone down.

Yes, I completely agree with this.

Interestingly (to me, anyway!), I discovered that the (brilliant) funeral directors that we used for our DGM had started out as a one-man carpentry business, well over a century ago.

He made cupboards and bookcases for people, so when they found themselves in need of a coffin, he was the obvious choice to ask to make it. Then, in a time when most people didn't have their own transport (whether early cars or maybe even a horse and cart), he naturally would have had some way of delivering his commissions, so obviously also ideal for transporting a coffin. Then it just all grew organically from that.

@SirAlfredSpatchcock I think you are spot on in terms of donations, some people absolutely think it's a way to avoid costs.

The criteria are based on what the donations will be used for. If you are going to teach anatomy you need normal anatomy. They will have weight limits on their trolleys and manual handling rules.

So probably more people get turned down than accepted.

I've just had the funeral for my father (he died almost 2yrs ago), who donated his body for medical research. It was a close thing as there was only one hospital with space.

He died in Bath, but ended up going to Nottingham from where he went to Edinburgh and possibly elsewhere. I didn't want to see the list of what he'd been used for but my brother did.

He wasn't signed up with an institution before he died though.

The plus side is they get their wishes met, help students and get a free cremation. The minus side was the wait for a very basic cremation, which could have been much longer than the 2yrs, which gets sprung on you out of the blue.

What a 24-carat gold prize turd.

It does seem very exacting - I don't like to use the word 'fussy'; but I suppose they do have to be a bit particular, and no point taking a donation that they can't use for the express purpose of being given it.

I'm thinking that they probably also get two distinct groups of offered donations: the people who are passionate about making a difference and leaving a final legacy to benefit future generations; and the people who look at the costs of standard funerals with a burial or cremation and see it as a bargain way of offloading the costs on to somebody else.

Yes, it is very expensive. We used an independent local funeral director and it cost 4.5k. The firm was excellent and a lot of the costs are fixed: cremation form, crematorium fees and the director’s fees were actually quite reasonable

Interestingly the funeral director we dealt with did talk about money, possibly as he had to make it clear what was and wasn't covered by the prepayment plan.

And the costs did go up very quickly and although the director was very sensitive, you feel horrible turning everything down.

I'm all for direct cremation as are my parents, thankfully. But while I can see that it's still a lot of money to many people, otoh, we can't really expect people to be managing the dead bodies of our loved ones for peanuts. It's hardly a job that people are jumping to do and there's not really perks to any of these gigs. I don't think the costs of transporting and dealing with the bodies are so out of whack and where else would the money realistically come from? There are paupers' funerals if people absolutely cannot pay, but councils can't fund it all and there are costs involved and an unlovely job to be done. Funerals aren't necessary (if they are to the person then they should pay) but the other death admin needs to be done and people need to be paid reasonably for doing it.

Personally, I don't think the funeral directors (the good, honourable ones) are unreasonable at all in what they charge. Yes, it's an unwelcome very large cost, but when you look at all they do for the money - including quite a proportion of your bill that they have to disburse directly to third parties - I don't begrudge it to them.

The reclaiming the pension procedure is disgusting, though. I realise that, technically, it was paid in error and should be returned; but they know very well that they are deliberately rubbing salt into the wound of grieving family members, by sending a demand for repayment so soon after the death - even more so when there was no estate to speak of and the payment has already been swallowed up. When you're mourning the loss of a loved one, it feels like such a calculating low-blow, with the authorities circling a deceased person to see what money they can get from them. The faux-sincere way they phrase it actually makes it worse, I think - "We're very sorry for your loss, but give us some of their money back now".

I know they would never countenance it, but I think a system of qualifying for your pension until maybe a month after you die would be a lot more respectful. That way, depending on the payment dates and the date of death, there would either be one more payment left to come, which would be a contribution towards the funeral costs, or otherwise it would already have been paid and so all sorted and settled. It's not like it isn't costed for, as if the person had hung on another fortnight/month/year/more, it would still have been paid to them. My DPs never lived long enough to claim their state pensions for which they'd paid their contributions for decades, and the DWP certainly wasn't clamouring to refund all of their 'profit' to us.

Having arranged the funerals of 3 close relatives (where thankfully cost wasn't a consideration for me), what struck me was the fact that the funeral directors never talk about money. They make statements like "just let me know if you want to visit X in the Chapel of Rest, you can visit as many times as you like", without adding that this will be racking up further costs. I know it's a delicate situation, but we were never handed any sort of itemised list so that we knew the additional costs. This was using 2 different, long established, well respected family run funeral directors.

I expect that if money was a major issue then you'd be forced to ask for exact pricing, but I'd rather that they be more upfront with costs. Appreciate that costs can be variable depending on where they have to collect the body from, how far away the funeral is and how long they have to store the body for between death and funeral, but they must have a formula for calculating it all.

I don't think we even asked about costs as the estate was paying for it in 2 cases and we were paying for the 3rd - but in the 3rd one I'm pretty sure the FD must have done us a good deal as it was a lot less than expected (having seen the bill for the other 2).

Personally, I'd like to be left on an isolated hillside in Wales for the red kites to eat. I can't think of a greener way to go.

My lovely next door neighbour died recently.
She left her son a house worth over £1mil, her savings and art collection.
He didn't even have a funeral service for her many friends to attend 🥺. He said it was a ridiculous expense.
She would have been mortified.
As she was a committed Christian, the local vicar arranged a little memorial service for her with tea and biscuits in the Church hall.
Awfully sad though.

I don't know if medical schools are over run but whenever I have spoken to them they have a lot of criteria:

Body is not too far for them to collect
Body not too big or too small
Body has normal anatomy- not had any major surgeries, no pressure sores
No infectious diseases

This effectively excludes a lot of donations