How to plan a funeral

If it has just happened

Take the next hour rather than the next week. Only four things genuinely belong to today. Getting the death formally pronounced. Telling the people who must hear it from you. Choosing who collects the person. And making sure the house, the pets and any medications are safe.

Everything else, including the casket, the service, the obituary and the flowers, can be decided tomorrow or the day after with better information and a clearer head. Funeral homes will not tell you that, not because they are dishonest but because their process moves at its own pace. You are allowed to slow it down.

The first 24 hours

1. Get the death pronounced. In a hospital or care facility the staff handle it. Under hospice care, call the hospice number first, day or night, and they will send a nurse. For an unexpected death at home, call 911. Nothing can move until a physician, nurse or medical examiner has pronounced.
2. Ask about organ and tissue donation. It is time critical, within hours. The hospital or the local procurement organisation will raise it, and the person’s driver licence or registry record may already record the decision.
3. Tell the immediate family. Then ask two or three of them to tell everyone else. Making forty phone calls yourself on the first day is the most common avoidable exhaustion in this whole process.
4. Look for existing instructions. A prepaid funeral contract, a letter of instruction, a will, a cemetery deed, a veteran’s discharge papers. Check the bedside drawer, the filing cabinet, the safe and the email inbox. Families arrange and pay for second funerals every year because a contract sat in a drawer.
5. Decide burial or cremation, provisionally. You need only enough of an answer to choose a provider. The comparison is here, and if cost is the deciding factor, direct cremation at $2,202 is the least expensive route in every state.
6. Ring three funeral homes and ask their price. They must quote over the phone. Fifteen minutes here routinely saves thousands, and the person you choose collects the body, usually within a few hours.
7. Establish who has legal authority. Every state sets an order, usually spouse, then adult children, then parents, then siblings. Cremation authorisation often requires all adult children to sign. Sorting this out on day one prevents the most common delay.
8. Secure the practical things. Lock the property, arrange care for pets, remove perishable food, take any controlled medication for safe disposal, and note the location of car keys, house keys and important papers. Do not post the address publicly.

The first week

This is when the money is spent and where the decisions matter most. Go in with a total in mind. The national median is $8,300 at the funeral home for a burial with a viewing and around $15,395 once the cemetery bills separately.

1. Hold the arrangement meeting, with someone else present. Take a person who was not close to the deceased, whose only job is to hold the price list and ask what each line is. Ask for the itemised statement of goods and services before you sign it.
2. Decline what you do not want. Under the Funeral Rule everything except the basic services fee is optional. Read how families get overcharged before the meeting rather than after it.
3. Order eight to twelve certified death certificates. At $10 to $30 each each this is the cheapest thing you will do all week, and going back for more later is slow. Every bank, insurer, registry and pension fund wants an original.
4. Confirm the cemetery separately. It is a different business with a different bill, covering the plot, opening and closing, any vault it requires, and the marker. Ask for its price list too.
5. Claim veterans benefits if they apply. A national cemetery interment costs nothing, and a flag, a headstone and a Presidential Memorial Certificate are free. See veterans funeral benefits and have the discharge papers ready.
6. Write the notice and the obituary. Keep the full date of birth, the mother’s maiden name and the home address out of anything public, because obituaries are read by people looking for identity details. A paid newspaper notice runs $200 to $600. An online notice through the funeral home is usually free.
7. Plan the service itself. Clergy or celebrant, readings, music, who speaks, pallbearers, and where people go afterwards. Give each reader their piece in writing so nobody has to improvise.
8. Tell the employer and the insurers. The employer may hold a group life policy, unused wages, a pension and accrued leave. Ask specifically about group life, because it is missed constantly.
9. Accept help and give it a shape. When people ask what they can do, have answers ready. Meals, airport runs, the reception, phone calls, minding the house during the service. Houses are targeted during funerals, so ask somebody to stay in it.

The first month

The administrative half. It is dull, it is long, and it is where money is actually recovered rather than spent.

1. Contact Social Security. The funeral home usually reports the death, but confirm it. A surviving spouse or eligible child should claim the $255 lump sum death payment, which must be claimed within two years, and ask about survivor benefits. Benefits are not payable for the month in which the person died, and any payment received for that month has to be returned, so do not spend it.
2. File life insurance claims. Each carrier needs a certified death certificate and a claim form. Search the papers and the bank statements for premium payments to insurers nobody remembered. What existing life insurance does and does not cover.
3. File the VA burial allowance claim if the burial was in a private cemetery. There is a two year deadline where the death was not service connected.
4. File the will with the probate court in the county where the person lived. Most states set a deadline for lodging it. Whether an estate has to be probated at all depends on what is in it and how it was titled.
5. Notify the three credit bureaus. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Ask for a deceased alert on the file. Notifying one usually informs the others, but do all three, because identity theft using the details of the recently deceased is common.
6. Work through the accounts. Banks, pensions, brokerage accounts, the mortgage, utilities, insurance policies, the motor vehicle agency, voter registration, the passport office, subscriptions, memberships and social media. Register the name with the deceased do not contact list run by the marketing industry to stop the mail.
7. Watch for debt collection scams. Callers who claim the deceased owed a debt, quoting details taken from the obituary, are a recognised pattern. Ask for written validation and never pay on a phone call. Family are generally not personally liable for a deceased person’s debts, though the estate may be.
8. Note the final tax return. A final individual return is due for the year of death on the ordinary schedule, and an estate may have its own filing requirement.

The full checklist

Documents to gather

Collect these into one folder before the arrangement meeting. The funeral home needs most of them to complete the death certificate, and hunting for them one at a time over three weeks is the part families find most wearing.

• Social Security number and card
• Birth certificate, and place and date of birth
• Parents’ full names, including the mother’s maiden name
• Marriage certificate, and divorce decrees if relevant
• Military discharge papers, the DD Form 214
• Occupation, employer and highest level of education
• The will, and the name of the attorney who holds it
• Life insurance policies and any prepaid funeral contract
• Cemetery deed, if a plot is already owned
• Recent bank, pension and investment statements

Who to notify

Paying for it

The funeral home expects payment at the time of the arrangement, usually before the service, which is weeks before most other money arrives. That timing, rather than the total, is what catches families out.

A sole bank account is frozen at death and the executor cannot reach it immediately. A life insurance claim commonly takes several weeks. Social Security pays $255 and no more. So the question is not only whether the money exists but whether somebody can reach it in the next seven days. The full cost guide sets out every line, and the calculator gives a figure for your own state.

If the money is not there

This happens often and there is no shame in it. A direct cremation at $2,202 is a complete and dignified disposition, and a memorial held later at a church or a home costs almost nothing. Nobody at the service knows what was on the invoice.

Beyond that, ask the county. Every state has an indigent burial mechanism run at county level, usually through the coroner or the department of social services, and it typically covers a direct cremation. Veterans benefits are separate and can remove the cemetery cost entirely. Some funeral homes will take payment in instalments if asked directly. And a family may release the body to the county rather than take on a debt, which is a legitimate choice and not a failure.

For anyone reading this before a death rather than after one, prepaid plans and burial insurance are the two ways to have the money ready, and writing down your wishes costs nothing at all.