Advantages of pre paid funeral plans
When someone passes away, those close to them are always faced with a number of both practical concerns and emotional issues, both of which can often overlap each other. Sometimes the death of someone is completely unexpected, at other times it can be more of a long-term reality that family and friends have come to understand and expect.
What is a pre-paid funeral plan?
Most people do not like talking or thinking about the fact that one day they will pass away. This seems to be fairly common to human nature.
One of the problems with this is that when someone does die, there can be numerous practical problems if proper arrangements have not been made beforehand. Most immediately, this can affect the funeral arrangements of the person concerned in many different ways.
A pre-paid funeral plan allows for several practical issues, as well as cost, to be thought about in advance and to be planned with some degree of structure and process that gives it a degree of stability.
Cost
The cost of a funeral can vary quite widely and in part depends upon the wishes of the deceased and the family as well. It is most likely that a funeral director will need to be engaged, and they will carry the vast majority of the cost as they will be the chief organiser of all the practical arrangements.
The cost should include most of the practical things that need doing. This normally includes the organising of death and funeral notices, transporting the deceased from the place of passing to the funeral directors premises, providing a coffin or casket, carrying out the funeral and arranging the burial or cremation.
The main advantage from a cost point of view is that decisions can be made and priced that are then fixed and normally cannot be changed unless different arrangements are subsequently decided upon. This also allows all options to be considered and depending upon the financial implications, a fixed plan can be agreed upon between all parties.
Pre-paid funeral arrangements
The advantages of pre-paid funeral plans apply not only to cost but to all arrangements that may be needed for the funeral itself. This allows thought to be given to what sort of funeral is to be held, i.e. whether burial or cremation, whether it is to be a religious funeral and if so what type of the denomination if any, or if a humanist type of funeral is preferred.
This also allows for any family or close friends to be involved if desired, and their support and input can be a crucial element in helping everyone decide what is in the best interests of the person who is likely to pass away.
This does not mean that these arrangements cannot later be changed if necessary, but it does provide a structured plan that can be referred to when the individual does pass away, which can be especially important at a time when everyone's emotional situation is likely to be quite volatile.
Life Assurance
Policies such as a pre-paid funeral plan are sometimes sold with other types of fairly simple insurance such as life assurance. These can be beneficial, but like any similar type of arrangement, linking two or more financial policies does to an extent blur the cost of each, and so it may be worth checking out the individual cost of each before taking them out.
For more information on a pre-paid funeral, contact a company near you.
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