Guidance on how to Plan a Funeral Services
Even under the best circumstances, planning a funeral isn’t easy. Be it the sudden death of a loved one, making funeral arrangements for someone who is terminally ill, or even preparing yourself for your own inevitable death, funeral planning can be worrisome, stressful, and emotionally painful – not to mention expensive and costly in more ways than one for anyone involved with it.
This article aims to help with this important, but difficult, part of life.
There are many different steps involved with funeral planning. Financial arrangements must be considered. As should a person’s own tastes and wishes (especially in the circumstance when an individual is arranging his or her own funeral). And those are just the start of important questions that must be addressed: Do you want to be buried? Cremated? Entombed in a mausoleum? What kind of casket or urn do you want to have?
The first step to proper funeral planning is to simply write down a list of all the important relevant questions, and then begin to answer them one at at time. Doing this will make the process easier to cope with from the very beginning.
Once the questions are written down, the answers can be given proper consideration and it’s a good idea to make sure you’ve covered all options in your bases. Here is an example: a person who chooses to be cremated can save on things such as a casket, interment and burial costs, which can potentially be important, especially if a person doesn’t have a lot of money to pay for a funeral. Some people like to be cremated so that their ashes can be spread over a place of significance in their life. Some individuals actually choose to be cremated inside a casket.
Fortunately, there is plenty of help available in understanding all of the options for proper funeral planning. Most funeral homes provide many different methods of giving loved ones a proper burial, as well as providing grief counseling for friends and family. Also important is that funeral homes provide varying degrees of funeral costs. Some funeral homes actually boast that a loved one’s burial can be tasteful and elegant, and still be inexpensive, albeit “inexpensive” being a relative term. When a family has no money to take care of funeral costs, even $1000-$2000 (an estimation of the cost of a much cheaper funeral) is still a lot of money. Situations such as this usually can provide special financing for the deceased’s family to help ease the burden. In extreme circumstances, such as the deceased having no family, the city that they resided in will pay for either cremation or an anonymous grave. And tragically this situation happens more frequently than people imagine. It should also be noted that if a person has the luxury of preparing and paying for their final rest, a good funeral can spiral upward to the cost of a traditional wedding, costing as much as $15,000-$20,000 for the service.
Another important aspect of funeral preparation are legal considerations. Estate affairs (i.e. last will and testament), living wills, as well as whether a person chooses to be an organ donor need to be taken into consideration long before a person goes to their eternal rest.
In summation, while even under the best of circumstances, preparing for a funeral is never a pleasant scenario. However, steps can and should be taken to insure the proceeding goes as smoothly and painlessly as possible. A loved one may be gone, but they should never be forgotten, and proper planning will ensure that will never be the case. You have many options for a Tribute as a Memorial.