Do you really want your survivors to spend $25,000 on your casket? I’m serious; some caskets cost even more than that! 
For that matter, do you want your family spending $10,000? $5,000? For a box that’s going to be buried six feet underground and, hopefully, never seen again? Ever?
Some people want a fancy casket. That’s why they exist. Other people would prefer that their money go for something that would be more useful to the living. That’s why there are also inexpensive caskets. 
Some funeral homes will try to tell you that it’s illegal to use anything but an expensive casket sold by them, but that is absolutely untrue. Federal law allows the consumer to use any kind of casket he/she wishes. You can even make your own casket. The funeral home has no right to try to force you to purchase a casket from them, or to choose an expensive model over a more economical one. They’ll try, but don’t you let them talk you into anything you don’t really want.
Morticians will still try to persuade you to buy an expensive casket, but that’s because they make a great deal of their money from the casket companies. The markup on a casket is unbelievable; a sealing gasket that costs eight dollars will raise the price of a casket up to $800.00!
My point here is that you need to make your wishes known to your family before you die, so your hard-earned money is either spent on a casket fit for a king, or so that same hard-earned money is spent more wisely. After all, who’s going to care about a casket? Besides the funeral parlor people, that is. . . .
Whether you want to splurge to the very end, or send the grandchildren to college with that same money, you need to write your wishes down and put them somewhere safe, somewhere like YouDeparted, for example.
And then you need to make sure you’ve told somebody where all your ’stuff’ is being kept. When it comes right down to it, you don’t really want your loved ones to have to choose your casket, anyway. It’s traumatic! Why not do it yourself and take one more burden off your survivors’ shoulders?
This entry was posted
on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 12:05 am
and is filed under Advice.
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