AIBU to think death is expensive.

[Dinoswearunderpants]

I just still can’t get over the cost of death/funerals in this country.

My Dad recently passed away and I had to arrange everything. There was a small funeral plan (Sunlife who were horrific to deal with!) in place but there was still a few hundred pounds shortfall I paid. My dad honestly thought he had enough money to full pay for his funeral and a little left over. No other assets and sadly a few debts.

He died in the hospital (which I blame for his death but that’s another matter) and we had to pay £82 just for a doctor to declare him dead. That’s utter madness! That was an itemised item on the funeral home invoice.

To transfer him 10 mins from the hospital to the funeral home, £280. To get him dressed £200. We didn’t choose embalming or to view him but if we had wanted to, embalming would have been £200 and £50 for each viewing.

Dad said he wanted a cardboard box for his coffin as it was "going to get burnt anyways" (his words) those coffins cost way more than the MDF ones. The wicker ones started at £1500.

I feel like it’s all so expensive. The ‘professional fees’ for the funeral home were £1200. Everything else was charged separate. In total it cost £5,500. My poor dad was a pensioner on state pension, had bugger all to show for all his hard work. I wish he could have used that £5,500 to enjoy life a little more.

I’m not really sure of the purpose of this post but it’s also to maybe get people talking about death and funerals. A huge issue I had was his paperwork was all over the place. I only found the life insurance policy numbers from his direct debits. I’ve just bought an A-Z book so I can keep a list of all my important details such as pensions, life policies etc to try and make it easier to contact everyone in the event of my death.

Just to add even more issues, DWP paid Dad his pension for a full month and now they're asking me (because I informed them of his death) for the overpayment back. It's about £150. I can't believe they're going after me for it. He literally had zero money left after the funeral was paid. The money in his account (which included this pension payment) went straight to paying for his funeral.

It’s common practice for DWP to ask for the pension back. And whilst funerals are expensive, let’s be honest it’s not a pleasant field to work in. Moving bodies from hospitals to funeral homes is not something I could do, so £280 sounds reasonable for that.

Like you said, people need to be aware a standard funeral is going to be between 3-5k and it’s a great idea to pay for it before the inevitable.

https://www.gov.uk/funeral-payments

there is some help if on benefits (link here incase it is helpful to someone)

but yes - death is very expensive.

Sorry for your loss.

My Mums funeral was £4.5k, she had enough money to cover it.
The funeral home did try to charge me £10 for "viewing" but as we didn't I insisted they remove that - apparently she was pay per view!!!
We paid for the things she would have wanted (willow coffin) and 1 big flower arrangement but we drove ourselves there. It would have been very easy to add things on and make it more expensive but we didn't see the point

Also bear in mind that, depending on a number of different factors, they may well find that they don't want/can't use the body at the time, so you may need to make other arrangements after all.

We had a friend who had put plans in place to leave his body 'to science', but on his death, they had to decline it, leaving his DDs rushing around to arrange a last-minute funeral and, presumably, also find the money to pay for it all.

When he was 8 years old, his parents had been told to say their Goodbyes to him and not bother making plans to visit him again the following day, as he had a few medical conditions and complications and 'wouldn't survive the night'. In spite of the fact that it had to be organised with very little notice, it was indeed a beautiful funeral for this much-loved gentleman, who left us a few months short of his 90th birthday!

My experience of my DF dying was that it was very easy to rack up the costs especially when you are grieving and only want the best for your loved one.

Am sure this why my DM has paid for direct cremation.

I’ve been to a lot of funerals recently and interestingly although they were all well off they were very simple.

No-one has had cars for relatives, and just a single flower arrangement. But I know they were still in the £10k ballpark.

The funerals I went to a decade or more ago always had cars. I think it’s good that they are trimmed down.

My parents have paid for theirs. I haven’t but I know what I want and there will be money for it as my death in service benefit at work is a lot. I’m having a green burial. I’m not bothered about a service but will leave that to family to decide.

Both my grandparents wanted to donate their bodies for research and filled in all the forms etc - but when the time came they weren’t wanted! They died more than 20 years apart so I can only assume the medical schools are constantly overrun with donations 😐

It seems like a good idea but I think you should have a back up plan just in case.

We're just in the process of organising MIL funeral. FIL died in 2017, and for the exact same funeral (humanist celebrant, at the crem, then cremated) it is almost £3k more today. It's crazy.

Eight years ago, funeral and wake cost £12k. Don't die just after the new year when there's a backlog of deaths and funeral directors have a wait list, as do the crematoriums. Religious ceremony, flowers, whatever coffin fits, regardless of cost. Cemetery plot etc, all add up. Dying isn't cheap.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What a 24-carat gold prize turd.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

' 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.

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.