What we do not do
What paying in advance does not lock in
It secures money. Whether it secures a price is a separate question with a written answer.
A pre-payment puts money into a trust in your name. What that money will buy in fifteen years depends entirely on what the agreement says, item by item: some things can be guaranteed at today's price and some cannot, and the ones that cannot are usually the ones bought from somebody else — the cemetery, the crematory, the newspaper, the clergy. Nothing bought from a third party can be fixed by us, because the price is not ours to fix.
Read the agreement for the word guaranteed and see which lines carry it. If a funeral home will not show you that in writing before you pay, that is the answer to the question.
Read the agreement for one word
The word is guaranteed, and the useful question is not whether it appears but which lines carry it.
A pre-payment puts money into a trust account in your name, where it earns interest. That much is straightforward and it works the same way wherever you pay it. What the money will buy in fifteen years is a separate question, and the answer is written into the agreement line by line rather than promised on the front of it.
Some lines can be held at today's terms and some cannot, and which is which does not depend on anybody's goodwill. It follows from who sells the thing. Anything bought from the cemetery, the crematory, a newspaper or the person leading the service is priced by them, and no agreement written by a funeral home can fix a price that is not its to set.
What to do about it
What to do before you sign anything
Six questions, and the first one is the one that makes the other five possible.
Take the agreement away and read it somewhere else
Nobody should sign this at the table it was handed across. A firm that minds you taking it home has already told you something worth knowing.
Find the word guaranteed and see which lines carry it
Not whether the document uses the word somewhere. Which specific items it is attached to, and just as importantly which ones it is not.
Ask what happens to the lines it is not attached to
There is an answer and it should be in writing: what is charged at the time, and how the difference is settled and by whom.
Ask whether it is revocable, and what would change that
Until it is made irrevocable the money remains yours. Making it irrevocable is usually done for a reason belonging to a different profession, and it is not a decision for the same conversation as choosing a casket.
Ask what happens if you move away
The money is yours rather than the firm's and it should follow you. If an agreement does not say that plainly, ask why it does not.
Ask about everything nobody here sells
The grave, the crematory, the notice, whoever leads the service. Those are the lines that cannot be fixed by us, and a family that knows which they are is not surprised fifteen years later.
How to recognise it
What a less honest version of this looks like
Almost none of it is written down. It lives in how the conversation is shaped and in what is not shown.
The word guaranteed attached to the plan rather than to a line
A plan is not a price. Ask to be shown the specific items it applies to, on the page, before anything is signed, and read the ones it does not apply to.
A reluctance to show the wording before payment
If the agreement cannot be read in full first, that is the answer to the question you were asking, and there is nothing further to find out.
Pressure in a first conversation
Writing your wishes down costs nothing and is worth doing at any age. Paying in advance suits some people and not others, and anybody pushing towards it at a first meeting is selling rather than helping.
None of that is an argument against paying in advance. It is an argument for reading the agreement, which takes one evening.
Writing it down is the other half of pre-planning and it costs nothing, here or at any funeral home worth the name. It removes most of what makes the arrangement meeting hard, which is a family guessing.
- Planning ahead — The two different things that get called pre-planning, and what each does.
- Writing it down — The free half: what we record, and how you change or tear it up.
- Paying for it — How a funeral is actually paid for, including the routes families do not know exist.
The rest of the argument
One argument in nine parts
Each of these is a place where a family is told less than it needs to know, by somebody, in an ordinary week. They are on separate pages because they come up separately. They are the same argument.
The other eight
If you have an agreement in front of you
Take it home and read it, wherever it came from. If you would like somebody to go through the wording with you, ring and we will, including when the agreement is not ours.