Plan your own funeral, just don’t pay for it now

livemint.com:

Plan now. Die later. Arranging your funeral now could save your family money and ensure you get the services you want.

But think twice before paying ahead for your final fête. Many funeral homes encourage people to prepay under arrangements that benefit them more than customers. “Don’t prepay but please preplan," said Sara Williams, president of Funeral Consumers Alliance, a consumer-advocacy group.

“Write it down and tell the world, so it’s not this crazy cluster when you die." Most people don’t plan ahead, leaving loved ones to shop for funeral packages and burial plots. “You’re not acting rationally when you are grief-stricken," Williams said. Even in the best of times, accurate funeral-pricing information is hard to find.

Some funeral directors say they are trained to upsell grieving families into buying more expensive packages and caskets for their loved ones—and to pay for their own future arrangements too. Janine Carreno, who worked as a funeral director at Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park and Mortuary in North Hollywood, Calif., from 2008-18, said salespeople at the business would loiter around graveside services to sell future services to mourners. “They were like hawks, watching every family walk by," Carreno said.

Diana Vactor told her family more than a decade before she died that she had prepaid for her service with a funeral home in Brooklyn, N.Y., and purchased cemetery plots in New Jersey for herself, her son and two grandchildren. Vactor’s granddaughter, Eartha Marks, remembers her saying she had paid $8,000 for the funeral expenses to E&C Owens Memorial Chapel. “It was her own retirement gift to herself," Marks said.