RPF0462-Ben_Higgenbotham_Interview
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00:00:29.000 | Ben, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.
00:00:33.000 | Glad to be here.
00:00:35.000 | So you, I've been wanting to get, in light of my kind of
00:00:39.000 | more radical version of how to get yourself put six feet under
00:00:44.000 | dirt cheap, I did want to reach out to a more traditional
00:00:48.000 | mainstream funeral director and get some advice,
00:00:51.000 | and so much better that you're a longtime member
00:00:54.000 | of the community, and you said, "Hey, here I'm available."
00:00:56.000 | So I would much rather speak with somebody who knows
00:00:59.000 | kind of what we're all about than go out and find somebody
00:01:02.000 | who doesn't.
00:01:03.000 | So thank you for making the time to come on the show today.
00:01:05.000 | Sure, not a problem.
00:01:07.000 | Let me go ahead and give you a little background on me
00:01:09.000 | because I may be more radical than you think.
00:01:13.000 | I've been involved in the funeral business for about 10 years now,
00:01:18.000 | and I'm actually on my way out.
00:01:21.000 | Really?
00:01:22.000 | Yep, changing jobs.
00:01:25.000 | It's sort of a job that requires it to be a calling,
00:01:32.000 | if that makes sense.
00:01:35.000 | Just the hours and the work situation, and I've decided,
00:01:43.000 | though it's a weird situation of being good at something,
00:01:46.000 | but it not being my calling.
00:01:49.000 | That makes sense because that's actually--I have a friend of
00:01:52.000 | mine who is a funeral director, went to high school with him,
00:01:56.000 | and just in watching, again, the hours that you said,
00:01:59.000 | you're always working on the weekends basically,
00:02:01.000 | but yet during the week you still have work.
00:02:04.000 | It would seem to be an all-consuming business
00:02:06.000 | in many ways.
00:02:07.000 | Right, right.
00:02:09.000 | And I also--I tend to agree with your philosophy that most
00:02:13.000 | funerals are overly expensive compared to what you get out of them.
00:02:18.000 | So anyway, I do have some issues with the business.
00:02:21.000 | I think it's a very valuable business,
00:02:24.000 | and what funeral directors do is excellent.
00:02:26.000 | Most of them are great people, some of the nicest people you'll ever meet.
00:02:30.000 | Just for me and my wife personally,
00:02:33.000 | going to pursue some different avenues, look for more of--build a situation
00:02:41.000 | where we can retire early possibly or do some traveling or something,
00:02:45.000 | which is very difficult to do in the funeral business.
00:02:48.000 | So what was your path into the business in the first place?
00:02:51.000 | I went to church with a fellow that owned the local funeral home,
00:02:57.000 | and when I was 15, I believe, he said,
00:03:04.000 | "Why don't you come over and work for me?
00:03:06.000 | I've got some odd job stuff to do, and you can help swing doors
00:03:10.000 | for the funerals and things like that,"
00:03:13.000 | which was an excellent high school job.
00:03:15.000 | If anybody is looking for a job in high school with a flexible schedule,
00:03:20.000 | I highly recommend you go do that.
00:03:22.000 | It's excellent for building personal skills.
00:03:25.000 | Typically, funeral homes have a pool of staff members that they have
00:03:31.000 | on an on-call basis, so you may not have to work every funeral,
00:03:37.000 | but you can work after school, you can work weekends.
00:03:41.000 | Excellent job for a high school student.
00:03:44.000 | Anyway, so I maintained that position through college.
00:03:50.000 | I went to a tech school for a couple years
00:03:54.000 | and got a certification in a different field,
00:03:57.000 | and when I graduated from that, the fellow that I was working for said,
00:04:01.000 | "Why don't you go to funeral director's school and get that out of the way?"
00:04:07.000 | So I went ahead and went back to a tech school and for about 18 months
00:04:12.000 | took courses and then got my Indiana State Funeral Director's license.
00:04:19.000 | And so since then you've been working as a funeral director?
00:04:23.000 | Yes.
00:04:24.000 | Awesome.
00:04:25.000 | Why did they go – I always thought the word "undertaker" was just a great word.
00:04:29.000 | Why did we go from undertaker to mortician/funeral director?
00:04:36.000 | That has a long historical context, and it depends on your region of the country.
00:04:44.000 | If you go to the northeast, I believe you'll hear more about undertakers and morticians.
00:04:51.000 | If you – I'm in the Midwest, it's funeral directors.
00:04:56.000 | Part of it is a traditional undertaker dates back to the Romans
00:05:03.000 | and the underground –
00:05:08.000 | The catacombs.
00:05:09.000 | Yes, the catacombs where they would actually take you under.
00:05:13.000 | So that was where that originated.
00:05:17.000 | Today we have funeral directors who are licensed by the state to perform a funeral,
00:05:27.000 | which is arrangements and overseeing the services and selling products.
00:05:33.000 | And then in some states you also have a licensure for a mortician or an embalmer.
00:05:41.000 | So for example, in Indiana we have a combined license.
00:05:44.000 | You can only get the one.
00:05:46.000 | I do know in Kentucky you're allowed to get either a funeral director's license
00:05:52.000 | or an embalmer's license, or you can get both if you want to do both things.
00:05:58.000 | So it's very regionalized, and it just depends.
00:06:04.000 | But that's why in Indiana we're called funeral directors.
00:06:07.000 | Awesome.
00:06:08.000 | So in my recent show that you listened to, I first just want to correct anything that I may have gotten wrong,
00:06:13.000 | and then we'll talk about your advice and kind of how you approach it in your current business.
00:06:19.000 | Did I make any major errors that you noticed?
00:06:21.000 | Did I mess anything up on the rules and the laws and the process in that show that I did
00:06:25.000 | about how to get yourself put six feet under dirt cheap?
00:06:28.000 | I did not catch anything, as is typical with your shows.
00:06:32.000 | It was very well researched.
00:06:35.000 | I did not catch anything that was actually wrong.
00:06:38.000 | There are a couple things that just involve the -- you mentioned cemeteries
00:06:47.000 | and some of the practices cemeteries have, they actually fall under a different regulatory setup than funeral directors.
00:06:54.000 | So some of the things that you can do, cemeteries will not allow you to do.
00:07:03.000 | Okay.
00:07:04.000 | So, for example, you had mentioned the green burial situation,
00:07:11.000 | which is a rising tide, I guess you'd say, because of several factors.
00:07:19.000 | People like the green burial option, and we're also running out of cemetery plots.
00:07:26.000 | So even some of the green burial cemeteries, you don't actually buy a plot of land.
00:07:33.000 | You don't buy anything per se.
00:07:36.000 | You rent a plot of land for, say, 50 or 75 years, and the plan is your remains will decompose
00:07:47.000 | and become part of the dirt and earth again, and then they will rebury in that same location.
00:07:54.000 | Right, because most traditional cemeteries, when you buy a plot, you're getting a concrete vault,
00:07:59.000 | and they put the coffin into the concrete vault.
00:08:02.000 | Whereas if you're doing the green burial, the body basically is after, I guess it's 50, 75 years,
00:08:09.000 | the body and the bones are going to be completely disintegrated, and they can reuse the space.
00:08:13.000 | Is that right?
00:08:14.000 | Correct, correct.
00:08:16.000 | The reason, since you mentioned the concrete vault, let's go into that real quick.
00:08:23.000 | Let me take a step back.
00:08:25.000 | In the mid-'80s, the FTC came into the funeral business and issued what's called the funeral rule,
00:08:33.000 | and that states what a funeral home has to provide as far as pricing to a customer.
00:08:44.000 | I guess back in the '70s, there was a lot of selling packages and not disclosing exactly what the costs were.
00:08:54.000 | So one of the items that that funeral rule covers is what's called an outer burial container.
00:09:01.000 | That can either be a grave box or a burial vault.
00:09:07.000 | A grave box is a--they're both made out of concrete.
00:09:12.000 | A grave box is purely concrete, does not seal, and typically has holes in it.
00:09:18.000 | The purpose of a grave box or a vault, if you've ever gone to a cemetery from the 1800s
00:09:24.000 | and you notice how the ground rolls so much, if you bury, say, a wooden casket,
00:09:32.000 | and after a couple of years that wood decomposes, that empty space all collapses.
00:09:37.000 | And that issue has been exacerbated by the construction equipment that we use now
00:09:45.000 | because very few people actually dig graves by hand. It's all with backhoes and whatnot.
00:09:51.000 | So a vault is distinct from a grave liner or grave box in that it seals and it has a plastic liner.
00:10:02.000 | So those are important to know the difference because often you'll go into a funeral home
00:10:07.000 | and they'll say the cemetery requires an outer burial container, and we recommend this vault, which is excellent.
00:10:14.000 | It's a great product. They're also half to twice as much money as a grave liner.
00:10:20.000 | So how does that affect the decomposition? If the grave vault is totally sealed,
00:10:27.000 | how does the body decompose versus a grave box where there'd be more interaction with the soil, the soil organisms, etc.?
00:10:36.000 | Yes, if you're in a grave box, if you're in an unsealed casket, then in theory,
00:10:45.000 | you should have the same protection as you would in a sealed vault.
00:10:49.000 | I'm sorry, in a sealed casket, you'd have the same protection as a sealed vault.
00:10:54.000 | In an unsealed casket, you're going to have decomposition same as you would if you were not in a concrete box at all
00:11:03.000 | because water comes in, water goes out. Like I said, they typically have a hole in the bottom of them.
00:11:08.000 | The lid just kind of sits on top of it, concrete to concrete. So there's no protection from that.
00:11:15.000 | As far as a sealed vault, if you have a properly embalmed body with a properly sealed vault,
00:11:23.000 | we don't actually know how long that will last because we've only been embalming with the methods
00:11:29.000 | that we have now since around the mid-1800s, and there are reasonably well-preserved bodies that get exhumed from then.
00:11:41.000 | So we haven't been long enough to find out how long it lasts.
00:11:48.000 | Would the results be similar to like the mummies I've seen, things like that, where skin and some tissue is still intact,
00:11:54.000 | or is it just the bones with modern embalming methods?
00:11:57.000 | Oh, no. With an embalming, that is a desiccation, as in dehydration method.
00:12:06.000 | So essentially, the tissue is reduced to a leather-ish consistency.
00:12:15.000 | With modern embalming, it is a displacement theory where the fluid in the body is replaced with the blood and so forth.
00:12:26.000 | Fluid is replaced with the embalming fluid.
00:12:29.000 | So there have been bodies exhumed from the '40s that look just like they were when they were buried.
00:12:36.000 | Wow. Wow. Interesting.
00:12:39.000 | So I want to tilt this in the direction of finance because otherwise I'm going to lose all credibility about this being the radical personal finance,
00:12:46.000 | and I'll just indulge all my curiosity about the science behind it.
00:12:50.000 | So let's switch to kind of the process. Let's say that I am approaching you just as a buddy of mine.
00:12:58.000 | My dad just died or he's soon going to die, and I'm approaching you as a buddy, and I'm saying, "Ben, we want the traditional thing."
00:13:07.000 | I heard this weird podcast where Joshua talked about digging a hole in the backyard, but that's not for us.
00:13:12.000 | We want to work with a funeral director. We want to have many of the modern customs and ceremonies that we're familiar with,
00:13:23.000 | but I'm not sure where to start because our money is not unlimited.
00:13:27.000 | How would you go about helping me to think through such a problem from your perspective and knowledge?
00:13:34.000 | The first question that you need to address is cremation or burial.
00:13:40.000 | That's really the first question, and that determines kind of the route that you take.
00:13:45.000 | When cremation first appeared on the scene, it was viewed as the sort of the pauper's option.
00:13:56.000 | It was the cheap way out, and that has really changed in the last few years just because of the popularity and people wanting to save money is what it amounts to.
00:14:07.000 | I would tell anybody that is either considering cremation or ambivalent on the subject.
00:14:15.000 | Some people have religious views and traditional views that say cremation is bad, and that's fine if that's what you want to do,
00:14:23.000 | but everyone needs to be aware that you can do everything that you think of as a normal funeral with a cremation.
00:14:35.000 | I would almost always recommend what's called a cremation with viewing, and that's going to include you can either purchase a casket or an item similar to a casket.
00:14:52.000 | They make all sorts of different things, wood, cardboard, metal, lots of options.
00:15:01.000 | What I recommend doing is funeral homes actually have access to what's called a rental casket.
00:15:08.000 | Picture just your traditional wooden or metal casket, but the inside of it, the lining and upholstery work is actually all removable,
00:15:18.000 | which saves a significant amount of money because you can get a nicer casket for lower price.
00:15:28.000 | So that's the option that I recommend if you want to go the cremation route.
00:15:32.000 | If you choose to burial, then what you probably want to do is ask your funeral director about their minimum metal option,
00:15:43.000 | and that is traditionally around $1,000 for the casket, and it's just as nice a casket as the ones that are up in the $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 range,
00:15:58.000 | but it's made from thinner metal typically and might not have quite as fancy a paint job.
00:16:04.000 | Call me biased, but the thickness of the metal of your casket is sort of the most irrelevant thing out there as far as I'm concerned.
00:16:14.000 | I mean –
00:16:15.000 | Why do people – so obviously – and I want to be gentle and recognize that people can choose, make different choices.
00:16:27.000 | It's their money. It's their loved one that they're trying to seek to care for, but I also just struggle to understand.
00:16:33.000 | When people are trying to buy a fancier casket, what are they thinking?
00:16:37.000 | What are they trying to accomplish in their mind by doing that?
00:16:43.000 | It's hard to tell. It comes down to a few different things.
00:16:47.000 | You have the people occasionally, and it's kind of the sad ones as far as I'm concerned,
00:16:55.000 | but the families that don't have good relationships, and so you'll see people that try to compensate for something by putting a loved one in a nicer casket.
00:17:10.000 | So you have that group of people, which is fairly small, and then you have – and this is one of the areas that I had some issue with.
00:17:20.000 | A lot of it has to do with sales. So if I bring you into a casket showroom that has a pricing range from $1,000 for the most unattractive minimum metal casket that I can find from my supplier up to an $8,000 casket,
00:17:40.000 | it's been studied, and scientifically speaking, you're going to buy middle of the range.
00:17:45.000 | So basically whatever I as the funeral home chooses, the middle of the range is what I'm going to sell the most of.
00:17:53.000 | Well, I take issue with spending $3,000 or $4,000 on a casket, and I understand that businesses have to make money and all that, but I question that.
00:18:09.000 | I honestly believe a lot of it comes down to marketing and just the way the whole industry is set up.
00:18:20.000 | And I would imagine also, and I'm not quite sure how to handle the ethics here because I don't know that you as a business owner have the moral duty to explain every possible option to somebody.
00:18:35.000 | That's hard for me to – and I've wrestled with this type of thing coming from the financial services business with insurance and investments.
00:18:43.000 | How do you figure out the line to draw in terms of what products that you offer?
00:18:49.000 | If I'm selling Mercedes-Benz, do I have a moral duty to explain to you that a Mercedes-Benz is more expensive than a Chevrolet and is more expensive than a Kia?
00:18:59.000 | And do I have the moral duty to keep price lists of all of the competitor manufacturers in my desk at work to show you before making the sale of the Mercedes-Benz?
00:19:13.000 | Or do I treat you caveat emptor?
00:19:16.000 | Do I say I'm going to show the very best that I can and show you the options but also expect that you need to do the due diligence?
00:19:23.000 | This would be one of the difficult questions is, "Do I – if I were a funeral director, do I have a moral duty and obligation to explain to every person that, yes, you can buy a casket at Costco or at Walmart or you can go and do these things?
00:19:39.000 | Or do I just have the obligation to demonstrate to you the products that I have and to seek to give you good information, answer your questions honestly and forthrightly, and allow you to choose?"
00:19:51.000 | And so I would guess that many people, one of the first challenges is they don't recognize that they can exercise their buyer's choice and bring together different vendors or different service providers in this whole situation.
00:20:04.000 | They don't have to buy it all at one shop all from the same person.
00:20:11.000 | It's not an easy – I don't know the answer to that.
00:20:14.000 | I don't know how far – the only thing I know is that people just – you act in good faith and you try to share and if somebody is – and convey to people what they need to know.
00:20:25.000 | But it's – for me, that's always been a difficult question to answer.
00:20:28.000 | Right. Yeah, when you go through training as a funeral director, the big thing they tell you is options. You've got to give everybody all the options. Tell everybody every – well, there are so many options.
00:20:40.000 | I mean we could have a three-day conversation just on all of the very, very cool things that the industry has come up with now that you can get personalized.
00:20:50.000 | I mean you can get all sorts of stuff done, but as far as practicality, you can't offer all the options.
00:21:00.000 | It's overwhelming.
00:21:02.000 | So the choice of what to address and what to offer, yeah, it gets complicated, and I'm not sure – obviously I didn't come up with a good answer.
00:21:13.000 | That's why you're leaving the business.
00:21:16.000 | Is there a difference between a casket and a coffin?
00:21:19.000 | There is. A coffin – this is probably a new word for you, but a coffin is anthropoidal, which means it's what Dracula sleeps in.
00:21:29.000 | It's wider at the shoulders and narrower at the feet.
00:21:32.000 | A casket is basic – you can still buy coffins, but they are very, very few and far between.
00:21:42.000 | A casket is – they come in different shapes and sizes, obviously, but that's what you think of as what people get buried in today.
00:21:52.000 | Typically metal, sometimes wood, curved on the top, generally square-shaped, possibly with rounded corners.
00:22:02.000 | And they're made from – the wooden ones are made in – they're not quite handmade, but they're real close to handmade.
00:22:14.000 | The metal ones are actually almost the same process as stamping out car bodies.
00:22:19.000 | There's a whole fascinating industry just about that on how the manufacturing goes into those.
00:22:27.000 | But again, that's a tangent that you could spend a couple days talking about.
00:22:32.000 | Right. So back to the question of cremation versus burial.
00:22:36.000 | Is the fundamental idea that cremation is going to be much less expensive simply because you don't have to have a place to bury the body, or is there more to it than that?
00:22:46.000 | There – that is a big portion of it, because you can spend between a third and possibly even up to a half of your funeral expense can be involved with the cemetery,
00:23:03.000 | depending on whether you're in a big city or just what the costs are and things.
00:23:10.000 | You can actually be buried if you've been cremated.
00:23:13.000 | There are cemeteries that have entire – most cemeteries have a section for burying cremated remains.
00:23:21.000 | There's a vault set up, a small concrete vault, and that you just place the urn inside the vault,
00:23:30.000 | and you can have a marker and all the things that you would traditionally think go with burial, but save –
00:23:39.000 | I mean, you go from a casket-sized funeral plot all the way down to about a four-foot square,
00:23:46.000 | or possibly even smaller than that, depending on how the cemetery is laid out, spot.
00:23:52.000 | So there is also – traditionally, cremation is what's actually known in the industry as a direct cremation,
00:24:02.000 | which would be where the remains are picked up, transported to a crematory, and then the ashes are simply returned to the family.
00:24:12.000 | That's where everyone gets the idea that cremation is so inexpensive.
00:24:16.000 | It's still less expensive than a full traditional funeral, but you can have a visitation.
00:24:23.000 | Like I was speaking about the rental caskets or the cremation caskets, you can have a full visitation,
00:24:31.000 | have a funeral service the next day, and then be cremated after that.
00:24:35.000 | So it's kind of one of those you can spend as much money as you want on a cremation on the high side,
00:24:43.000 | but on the low side, you can still save money.
00:24:50.000 | So with regard to the decision of cremation versus burial – so for example, I'll give just the two reasons I know of.
00:24:58.000 | Historically, Christians have been opposed to cremation for two historic reasons.
00:25:06.000 | One is that Christians believe in the physical resurrection of the physical body in the long term.
00:25:13.000 | So in the same way that the body of Jesus was physically resurrected,
00:25:17.000 | Christians believe that the physical bodies of all people will eventually be resurrected.
00:25:23.000 | And so in that context, there's a pressure or a desire to keep the body somewhat intact.
00:25:30.000 | The second reason was that historically, many of the pagan religions viewed cremation as a way to release the spirit of the person.
00:25:39.000 | And so standing against that, Christians in the time when that spiritual teaching was prominent,
00:25:45.000 | standing against that, Christians never practiced cremation because of wanting to disavow and come against that teaching of the time.
00:25:54.000 | Today, both of those things I would say are much lessened.
00:25:58.000 | I know of almost no people, no Christians or people who come and say, "Well, I'm morally opposed to cremation because of this."
00:26:07.000 | The pagan practice of the idea of the release of the spirit being accomplished through cremation so the spirit can go back to the afterworld,
00:26:16.000 | that's almost non-existent, at least in the US American culture.
00:26:19.000 | And with regard to cremation, many people just say, "Well, either way, it's okay."
00:26:25.000 | I would say many Christians would say, "If God can't knit the ashes together, it says from dust to dust.
00:26:31.000 | So it's all dust anyway. So what's the difference between dust and ashes?"
00:26:35.000 | So I know, for example, the Catholic Church no longer has an official stance against cremation,
00:26:42.000 | but they would say that the ashes ideally are going to be contained in some sort of sealed vessel
00:26:48.000 | so that that way they're at least all together and not scattered about as some people would do.
00:26:52.000 | Are there any other significant – that's the extent of my knowledge on the subject.
00:26:56.000 | Are there any other significant reasons why people would choose burial over cremation or cremation over burial, Ben?
00:27:03.000 | Not really. It's basically just a philosophical difference.
00:27:07.000 | There are a few situations where cremation has some restrictions that can usually still be done.
00:27:16.000 | For example, if you have had radiation treatment, there's a waiting period.
00:27:24.000 | So the crematory would just hold the remains for a certain period of time before cremation
00:27:30.000 | just to make sure that radiation has dissipated and no one living gets harmed.
00:27:38.000 | Other than that, pretty much everything can be overcome.
00:27:43.000 | You can't cremate electronic devices.
00:27:47.000 | So say if someone has a pacemaker, because of the lithium batteries that has to be removed,
00:27:53.000 | but that's not a big stumbling block, that's very common.
00:28:00.000 | Like I said, it's basically just a philosophical difference.
00:28:04.000 | So no one can force you one way or the other, but I'm ambivalent on the subject.
00:28:12.000 | I figure, like I said, we've only been embalming as modernly recognized for maybe 150 years.
00:28:22.000 | And prior to that, everyone decomposed anyway.
00:28:25.000 | So if you can come back from decomposition, surely you can come back from cremation.
00:28:31.000 | Yeah, well it doesn't make sense to me the whole kind of – I don't know if it's probably obsession,
00:28:36.000 | it would be too strong of a word, but in my mind, in our modern world,
00:28:39.000 | kind of just this intense focus on preserving the body to me would seem to be a little bit out of place.
00:28:46.000 | It would just seem to me to be a lack of recognition of the fact that the body is done.
00:28:50.000 | It's going to be decomposed.
00:28:52.000 | So I would be quicker to say why would we spend a lot of time and money embalming.
00:28:57.000 | Walk me through the prices and kind of the ranges.
00:29:00.000 | So again, I'm sitting in your office and you started with cremation versus burial.
00:29:05.000 | Share with me kind of the standard speech and approach
00:29:08.000 | and the ranges that you would be giving to me if I were a prospective client.
00:29:12.000 | Sure. Let's take a step back real quick again.
00:29:17.000 | I spoke about the funeral rule earlier.
00:29:20.000 | That's important to know about because every funeral home in the U.S. is required,
00:29:26.000 | before they begin speaking about pricing, to give you what's known as a general price list
00:29:32.000 | that is laid out by the government, has I think about 25 different items on there
00:29:38.000 | that they're required to give you specific individual prices on.
00:29:43.000 | So always when you go into a funeral home, always ask for the general price list.
00:29:48.000 | They should give it to you.
00:29:50.000 | There's a big fine if they don't, so most of them are on top of it.
00:29:54.000 | But on that general price list, you're going to see several pricing options,
00:29:59.000 | one of which is going to be for a traditional service.
00:30:03.000 | That's going to include probably a one-day visitation, one-day service, embalming,
00:30:14.000 | vehicle transportation, just everything that is traditionally included in a service.
00:30:21.000 | That can range depending on the funeral home's pricing structure.
00:30:27.000 | That can range anywhere from about $2,500 up to about $5,000.
00:30:34.000 | That's going to include what's known as a basic service fee, which is--
00:30:41.000 | that funeral rule lays out the only fee that you're not allowed to decline
00:30:47.000 | is the basic service fee.
00:30:50.000 | So just depending on how the funeral home structures its business,
00:30:53.000 | that basic cost of the funeral director might be higher, might be lower.
00:30:59.000 | So there's that going to show up.
00:31:02.000 | You're going to see a direct cremation charge,
00:31:05.000 | which is going to include your basic costs of the funeral home,
00:31:10.000 | and then, say, a direct cremation pickup.
00:31:16.000 | Most funeral homes today require a visual identification of some form
00:31:22.000 | because of the liability that accompanies cremation,
00:31:29.000 | one of the few things in the world you can't undo.
00:31:32.000 | So they're going to require a family member to be there at the crematorium
00:31:35.000 | to identify the body?
00:31:37.000 | Some require at the crematorium.
00:31:40.000 | We did not actually have a crematory,
00:31:43.000 | so we just did one prior to sending the body to the crematory.
00:31:47.000 | Some funeral homes will do it via a photograph,
00:31:51.000 | depending on the condition of the deceased.
00:31:54.000 | So just something that you should be aware of that someone will probably ask
00:31:59.000 | a family member to do that.
00:32:01.000 | And most family members want that time as a final goodbye.
00:32:07.000 | So you're going to see those options as far as pricing.
00:32:10.000 | Direct cremation can range anywhere from--
00:32:14.000 | I think the lowest I've seen is about $7.95.
00:32:19.000 | That comes from what's called a cremation service,
00:32:22.000 | typically different from a funeral home in that there's not going to be an option
00:32:29.000 | to have a visitation or a funeral service with the cremation service.
00:32:37.000 | All they do is a pickup cremation, return the ashes,
00:32:42.000 | up to--go ahead.
00:32:44.000 | So this idea of visitation, this is obviously where you can see the body.
00:32:51.000 | How quickly can visitation occur without any kind of embalming
00:32:59.000 | or, again, in my research, instead of embalming,
00:33:03.000 | you can accomplish some preservation of the body with chilling.
00:33:07.000 | How quickly can visitation occur
00:33:11.000 | and then how quickly do you need to go ahead and embalm
00:33:13.000 | to have visitation at a later date?
00:33:15.000 | How quickly does that decomposition process start?
00:33:19.000 | The state of Indiana requires refrigeration after 72 hours.
00:33:24.000 | So you can actually remain completely unrefrigerated for three days
00:33:30.000 | before they say that that's kind of the beginning.
00:33:37.000 | And it really just--a lot of it depends on the deceased person,
00:33:42.000 | what medications they might have been taking,
00:33:45.000 | what sickness they may have had, if it was a car accident.
00:33:52.000 | Lots of factors come into that.
00:33:55.000 | But usually, say, two or three days could go by before you would have to--
00:34:03.000 | you would have decomposition starting to set in and things--
00:34:07.000 | nothing that couldn't be fixed, but at that point,
00:34:11.000 | to spend the time to make things look right without embalming
00:34:19.000 | would verge on the same cost as if you simply had an embalming done at that point.
00:34:25.000 | And then with embalming, how long--
00:34:29.000 | and the reason I'm saying this is because I know one of the--
00:34:31.000 | if you have, let's say, an expected death, somebody is elderly,
00:34:35.000 | they're expected to die, that gives the family time to make these preparations.
00:34:39.000 | But one of the biggest challenges with many deaths is that it comes out of the blue.
00:34:46.000 | It just happens.
00:34:47.000 | And so then the family is left reeling.
00:34:50.000 | They're reeling emotionally, and then they're trying to figure out how to make these circumstances,
00:34:54.000 | and then you have this pressure of time.
00:34:56.000 | Well, we've got to have the funeral in a certain-- with a certain hurriedness,
00:35:02.000 | especially as it involves the body.
00:35:05.000 | So how long can a body be kept suitable for if a family wants to have a viewing of the body?
00:35:12.000 | How long can that actually occur with modern embalming methods?
00:35:17.000 | Again, there are a lot of factors.
00:35:21.000 | When you start getting in, it's sort of like medicine at that point.
00:35:24.000 | It's hard to say exactly how a body will react.
00:35:28.000 | The longest period of time that I personally did was about two weeks.
00:35:32.000 | Wow.
00:35:34.000 | So it's not-- if you choose the embalming and you have a good embalmer,
00:35:38.000 | it's not nearly as time critical as people have the impression that it is.
00:35:44.000 | How much does the embalming option add to the cost?
00:35:49.000 | Again, depends on the funeral home.
00:35:51.000 | It's very unspecific, I can't be-- our charges particularly were $8.95.
00:36:00.000 | So around that pricing, give or take a little bit.
00:36:05.000 | But it's not required to do embalming.
00:36:08.000 | You can still have a public viewing of the body even if it's not embalmed,
00:36:14.000 | as long as that happens quickly; is that right?
00:36:17.000 | That is correct if you can find a funeral home that will do it.
00:36:22.000 | Our particular policy was that we would not do an open casket visitation
00:36:29.000 | with a non-embalmed body.
00:36:32.000 | So you could still have the complete viewing and everything you would want to do
00:36:40.000 | with the casket closed and sealed, we would do that.
00:36:44.000 | But as far as having an open casket where people could view the body,
00:36:49.000 | that was against our business's policy.
00:36:54.000 | So you have to ask each individual funeral home what their policy is on that.
00:37:01.000 | But as far as a legal requirement, no, there's no legal requirement to be embalmed.
00:37:05.000 | And that would be a business policy that in many ways would make sense to me
00:37:09.000 | because it would involve the reputation of the funeral home, etc.
00:37:14.000 | And especially when people are viewing a dead body, you want it to be as--
00:37:19.000 | in our modern world, you want it to be as non-shocking as possible, right?
00:37:25.000 | In the business, it's called a memory picture.
00:37:28.000 | And there have been studies that say--I mean there's been studies that say everything.
00:37:34.000 | The current belief is that a visitation with the body present
00:37:41.000 | is incredibly valuable for the grieving process.
00:37:47.000 | Having one last, as I said, memory picture of your loved one
00:37:52.000 | in a peaceful resting position.
00:37:55.000 | And part of this has come about because of the hospice movement, which I'm all for.
00:38:01.000 | But people are going home and spending their last days.
00:38:05.000 | And while that's a good thing, that also leaves the family with that picture of--
00:38:12.000 | while they may be at peace, that person is not looking their best.
00:38:18.000 | And so having that final time with Grandpa in his best suit
00:38:23.000 | and laid out peacefully and all of his friends around,
00:38:27.000 | that does have great effect in processing the grief for the family members.
00:38:34.000 | Yeah. That was exactly what was going to be my next question.
00:38:37.000 | I can definitely see that because when I think of all of my family members who have died,
00:38:41.000 | I mean the pictures of the dead body is firmly imprinted on my memory as a way to--
00:38:46.000 | you don't forget those pictures. It's firmly printed there.
00:38:49.000 | And it does bring a sense of closure to the fact that--
00:38:54.000 | especially if the death has been shocking or sudden,
00:38:57.000 | it brings a sense of closure to say, "Here's the body. This person is dead.
00:39:01.000 | That life is brought to an end."
00:39:04.000 | And also definitely I can see the value of that if you've been caring for a loved one.
00:39:11.000 | I know when one of my grandfathers died, I had spent years caring for him.
00:39:16.000 | And it's definitely a nice--
00:39:20.000 | it's definitely nice to have that--to not necessarily have to think of them as sick
00:39:25.000 | but to see them--see their body in a relaxed state.
00:39:28.000 | Yeah. That makes all the sense in the world to me.
00:39:31.000 | Right. And even just as much as a change of clothes
00:39:34.000 | because if you've ever cared for an elderly person, they don't put dress to the nines.
00:39:41.000 | I mean there's a lot of pajamas and things of that nature, which is fine.
00:39:46.000 | But also people just--you look so much better in a suit or a nice dress or something.
00:39:53.000 | So there's a lot to be said for that.
00:39:56.000 | Again, that's why I personally recommend the cremation with viewing option
00:40:02.000 | because if you just go with a direct cremation, it's hard to have closure after that.
00:40:10.000 | So something to consider.
00:40:12.000 | And also especially with fragmented families,
00:40:15.000 | often if you have family members who are spread across the country
00:40:18.000 | who haven't been--haven't seen the person in some amount of time,
00:40:23.000 | they would like to have the picture.
00:40:25.000 | They would like to be able to see their body and to see what they look like,
00:40:28.000 | to see how they were in their final days as a sense of bringing that closure as well.
00:40:33.000 | Right. Right.
00:40:35.000 | I will throw out there this is just a part of the business that always entertained me.
00:40:41.000 | I'm going to say probably 90% of--probably as high as 95% of all the families that we served
00:40:50.000 | would come in and about halfway through the arrangements,
00:40:54.000 | they'd lean in real close and they'd kind of whisper.
00:40:58.000 | Somebody would get behind their hand and talk to you and say, "Our family is really strange."
00:41:04.000 | And everybody's the same.
00:41:07.000 | Don't be at all worried about your strange family because everybody has family.
00:41:14.000 | That's funny.
00:41:16.000 | That's why they call it a family, right?
00:41:18.000 | We all have our own challenges.
00:41:21.000 | Back to kind of the different services.
00:41:24.000 | So I think in my mind I'm relatively clear about cremation versus burial.
00:41:29.000 | Major benefit of cremation can be that you eliminate many of the cemetery costs
00:41:35.000 | because somebody chooses to have a place to put the ashes in a cemetery.
00:41:40.000 | But at least then you don't have to handle a lot of the cost of the cemetery,
00:41:48.000 | which as you said can add a half to a third of the fee.
00:41:51.000 | Now – or a third to a half of the fee.
00:41:54.000 | Now also, given those choices, that would also make a difference in terms of some of the services of the funeral home.
00:42:02.000 | It would be traditional if you're going to bury the body.
00:42:05.000 | Often there will be a graveside service as well as a memorial service, wherever it's held.
00:42:10.000 | And so if you're not going to have a graveside service because you're not going to be interring the body,
00:42:15.000 | then that eliminates some cost as well.
00:42:18.000 | What are the other – like how do the costs break down of the funeral director's services,
00:42:23.000 | of memorial service, transportation of the body, et cetera?
00:42:28.000 | So I'll just lay out our costs.
00:42:33.000 | And as I said, it changes depending on – some funeral homes have a pricing structure
00:42:37.000 | where they include all the overhead in the service fees.
00:42:44.000 | Some of them add overhead to the casket sales.
00:42:48.000 | So it just depends.
00:42:50.000 | Our particular pricing was the – we charged $17.95 for the basic services of the funeral director,
00:43:01.000 | which included all of the paperwork filing, the meetings, basically all of our time,
00:43:07.000 | and the building, the office portion of the costs.
00:43:14.000 | Then we would charge $6.95 for each day of a service of whatever form.
00:43:23.000 | So visitation would be one day.
00:43:27.000 | Funeral would be another – if you had a funeral the second day, that would be another charge.
00:43:32.000 | There's a charge typically for the pickup or removal of the body when we get what's called a first call
00:43:41.000 | notification, say, from a nursing home or a hospital or even from a home death.
00:43:49.000 | So there will be a charge for that.
00:43:51.000 | That was around $2.95.
00:43:55.000 | The charge for the hearse and the vehicles for the funeral procession would be included –
00:44:04.000 | basically our charges for what was called a traditional service would have been $49.95.
00:44:11.000 | On top of that, you would expect for a traditional service to pay for a casket that can range anywhere from $1,000 up to –
00:44:23.000 | the highest one we carried was about $49.95, but, I mean, you can get Michael Jackson's 24-karat gold one if you have enough money.
00:44:33.000 | But – so you'd expect to pay for that.
00:44:37.000 | If you're choosing burial, you would pay for an outer burial container, which ranged from about $99.95 to –
00:44:45.000 | or, I'm sorry, $9.95 to $1,800 or so.
00:44:52.000 | That would be all the charges for the funeral home.
00:44:56.000 | Then there's also traditionally honorariums to a minister if you have a minister.
00:45:04.000 | If you have someone come in and play a musical instrument or sing something, traditionally there's an honorarium for that.
00:45:12.000 | What are those amounts usually? How much do ministers get paid for that?
00:45:16.000 | In my region, about $125 would have been a typical honorarium.
00:45:23.000 | In, say, for an organist or a solo singer or something of that nature, typically about $50 or $75 a person.
00:45:33.000 | You would expect to pay – in Indiana, funeral homes typically will get you copies of death certificates from the local health department.
00:45:45.000 | That ranged – because each county in Indiana sets the pricing for that, and the death certificate comes from the county that the death has occurred in.
00:45:56.000 | So we would file those all over the state.
00:45:59.000 | But they range from about $8 to about $20 a copy.
00:46:04.000 | Then however many of those you would need depend on how many bank accounts you have, whether you own property,
00:46:11.000 | whether there's a lawyer involved with the estate, just a whole bunch of things that would affect how many copies of that you would need.
00:46:22.000 | Tyler Goetz: Then on top of that, then, you would have to work out arrangements with the cemetery separately.
00:46:29.000 | What would those fees range often?
00:46:33.000 | Some funeral homes associate with a cemetery.
00:46:38.000 | They might have their own there right next to the funeral home.
00:46:43.000 | Depending on whether you go with a church cemetery or a commercial cemetery, you're probably looking at ranging from $400 to $800.
00:46:59.000 | This is in my area, in the big cities. I know it's quite a bit more expensive.
00:47:04.000 | But $400 to $800 for the actual burial plot in my area, it was about $650 depending on who you had dig the grave.
00:47:16.000 | That would be what's called the opening and closing charges.
00:47:20.000 | Then there would be – you might see a charge for the tent arrangement.
00:47:26.000 | Typically, you'll have a tent and chairs for the graveside service.
00:47:34.000 | There might be a charge for that. There might not.
00:47:37.000 | Then you'd have on top of – that would be the cemetery's charges.
00:47:44.000 | But on top of that, you have the outer burial container, which you wouldn't have if you're not being buried in a cemetery.
00:47:52.000 | So with regard to the cost, I mean that is helpful to see those services broken out.
00:47:58.000 | I personally could see how just with that, somebody could think through kind of what's important to them and what's not, laying aside what I talked about with green burial and just putting somebody in the backyard type of thing.
00:48:12.000 | You could directly transport the body, right?
00:48:16.000 | There's no reason why if I have a family member who dies at the hospital and if I were just going to take the body directly to a crematorium, there's no reason why I can't borrow a friend's pickup truck and do that, right?
00:48:27.000 | I don't have to use somebody to do that.
00:48:30.000 | Would the hospital generally – would the body be packaged in some sort of cardboard box or something like that that I could use to transport?
00:48:38.000 | Not from a hospital. Pretty much if you wanted to do that, what I would recommend doing – and you're going to probably get some weird looks, but ask your crematory or funeral home.
00:48:55.000 | So most crematories have a requirement that you have a transportation container or a cremation container, which is a picture of a wooden tray with a cardboard top on it.
00:49:09.000 | And that's how they transport bodies.
00:49:13.000 | Well, there's no reason why you couldn't ask the funeral home to just give you the cremation container and then take that to the hospital and do the transportation from there.
00:49:23.000 | Right. Or somebody could do that transfer if they needed to save the $295, which again is probably not worth it.
00:49:31.000 | But somebody could do that transport directly to the funeral home, right? To pass the body if that were going to be – where we're going to be embalmed?
00:49:41.000 | Correct.
00:49:42.000 | Okay. And then the embalming process, that's largely going to be driven based upon do you want to have an open casket so that the family members can see and as you put it, create that memory picture of the body at peace.
00:49:58.000 | And then in terms of the basic services, you could just have a very simple service if you add an additional visitation to that.
00:50:07.000 | That's an additional day's charge and then you have the questions of the caskets, et cetera.
00:50:12.000 | You could eliminate – if you eliminated the vehicle procession and the graveside services, that would also result in a significant discounting of expenses, right?
00:50:21.000 | Correct.
00:50:22.000 | Okay. What are the biggest – so at this point, I think for me, I've asked most of the questions that seem apparent to me.
00:50:30.000 | What are the biggest mistakes that you often see families make in this process especially as they relate to money?
00:50:37.000 | And what are some of the frequently asked questions that I haven't even thought to ask you about?
00:50:41.000 | Probably the most frequent thing that – the mistake that I see is people confuse preplanning and prepaying.
00:50:53.000 | Everyone who's over the age of 20 should go to a funeral home and preplan.
00:50:58.000 | And that – all that entails is sitting down with the funeral – well, A, picking a funeral home, sitting down with that funeral home, getting their price list.
00:51:08.000 | You can look at their selection room, pick the goods and services that you might want.
00:51:15.000 | Typically, funeral homes don't have any charge for that.
00:51:21.000 | I don't know of any funeral home that charges for that.
00:51:26.000 | Basically, it's just them building their book of business.
00:51:30.000 | And then they give you a copy of that file.
00:51:34.000 | They keep a file of it, and you're good to go.
00:51:37.000 | People confuse that with prepaying for a funeral, which is – the only reason to prepay for a funeral is if you're elderly and you are planning on going on Medicaid,
00:51:53.000 | a prepaid funeral is one of the ways that Medicaid will allow you to spend down your resources.
00:52:00.000 | It has to be in a irrefundable or irrevocable trust.
00:52:07.000 | So once it's been paid for, you can't get the money back out, and it has to be with a funeral home.
00:52:14.000 | So that's a good way to reduce your assets.
00:52:18.000 | Post-death expenses.
00:52:20.000 | Well –
00:52:21.000 | Reduce the assets to qualify for Medicaid while still getting something of value.
00:52:24.000 | Right, right, as opposed to just – because there are specific – I don't know if you've ever dealt with Medicaid,
00:52:29.000 | but you can't just go blow all your money.
00:52:32.000 | You can't take a Vegas trip so that you qualify for Medicaid.
00:52:36.000 | They don't like that.
00:52:38.000 | So that's, as far as I'm concerned, the only reason to ever prepay for a funeral with a funeral home.
00:52:46.000 | So point of clarification, even if somebody – because I've had financial planning clients, and I didn't know any major reason to tell them to do it or not to do it.
00:52:54.000 | I've had financial planning clients who is part of kind of their 70 years old, and they want to just make sure everything is wrapped up.
00:52:59.000 | They would go ahead and preplan and also prepay the fee directly to the funeral home.
00:53:05.000 | What you're saying is you don't see any benefit of actually doing that prepayment even for somebody in that circumstance?
00:53:12.000 | At least not benefit for the individual, the benefit for the funeral home, but not benefit for the individual?
00:53:16.000 | Right.
00:53:17.000 | There's not really – so there's a couple different ways you can prepay for a funeral home, and this is sort of the back end of it.
00:53:23.000 | But what the funeral home does with that money, because it has to be held in trust.
00:53:28.000 | So either they can purchase an insurance product, or they can invest it in a trust fund that's based with the stock market.
00:53:41.000 | The advantage to – or the supposed advantage to a prepaid funeral is that say I go in when I'm 40 and prepay my funeral, that is a guaranteed funeral.
00:53:59.000 | So I will get what I chose or an equivalent product if that product is no longer available whenever I pass.
00:54:10.000 | So the theory is if you buy your funeral now and inflation happens in 20 years when you pass away, then you've got that locked in pricing from today 20 years later.
00:54:24.000 | Well, in theory, if you manage your finances, you ought to be able to invest that same amount of money, get the returns off of it, and keep up with inflation.
00:54:39.000 | So there's that side for the investments, and on the other side, if you're buying an insurance policy, an insurance policy is an insurance policy regardless of who the beneficiary is.
00:54:50.000 | So there's no reason to do that through the funeral home and be locked into that when you could just buy yourself a life insurance policy and have it pay to your estate, and then your estate would take care of it.
00:55:05.000 | Right, right.
00:55:08.000 | What else? What other frequently asked questions or pieces of advice did I miss?
00:55:13.000 | You've talked several times about burial on private property.
00:55:18.000 | That one is kind of a two-edged sword depending on your local laws and ordinances that you need to check into, and I'll tell you why.
00:55:30.000 | In Indiana, the current thinking is the definition of a cemetery is anywhere where the remains of a human are buried.
00:55:39.000 | So if you have someone cremated and buried on your property, the current interpretation of the law is you now own a cemetery, which becomes problematic that if you go to sell that piece of property, you have to disclose that there's a cemetery on it.
00:55:58.000 | If, say, you want to, you know, if you bury someone on the Back 40 because that was their favorite place, that's excellent.
00:56:07.000 | You go to sell the Back 40 to a farmer, and now you can't farm this particular spot of land, I mean, not the whole 40, but wherever your "cemetery" is located, to do anything with that.
00:56:21.000 | Now you're talking about exhuming that remains and all sorts of headache.
00:56:29.000 | So if it's a cremation situation, you always want to scatter ashes.
00:56:36.000 | You never want to bury them because if you scatter them, it's not a – it does not get considered as a cemetery.
00:56:47.000 | Or, I mean, a lot of people have the old, like, Indian cemeteries or the family plots.
00:56:55.000 | I mean, there's nothing wrong with that.
00:56:57.000 | Just check your local regulations and see if there's any particular reporting or anything that you need to be aware of before you do that.
00:57:06.000 | So one of the questions that I have always been interested in, which I never have fully researched, is how the actual cemetery business works.
00:57:15.000 | If I wanted to start a business – because there are cemeteries that, as you said, are public or commercial endeavors.
00:57:24.000 | How does that business work? How does it function?
00:57:27.000 | That is not – I'm not really familiar with that, but basically what happens is obviously you buy a piece of property, and then there's a – you have to have it surveyed.
00:57:43.000 | And basically they lay out the entire cemetery or as much of it as is going to be for sale and get the – it's lots, plots, and spaces is their – or sections, lots, and spaces is typically how they're laid out.
00:58:04.000 | And then you would go and you would sell spaces.
00:58:09.000 | And when you sell a space, there's a requirement to maintain a fund to maintain that cemetery.
00:58:20.000 | So a portion of the space cost goes into a holding fund basically that pays for the lawn mowing and the road maintenance and things of that nature.
00:58:34.000 | And then the remainder is what you'd consider a profit if it were a commercial endeavor.
00:58:42.000 | Or if it's like a church cemetery, it goes into their operating fund.
00:58:47.000 | And then depending on the size of the cemetery, if it's a large, say, a city cemetery, they probably have their own mowing crew and their own opening and closing crew and things like that.
00:59:03.000 | If it's a smaller church sort of setting or on your private property, then there are companies or individuals that dig graves.
00:59:16.000 | So there would be no overhead for that if you used an independent grave digger.
00:59:22.000 | But it's pretty simple. There's just a lot of record-keeping that goes along with it.
00:59:29.000 | Anything else I missed?
00:59:34.000 | I will say I do recommend buying cemetery plots if you desire to be buried and you desire to be buried with your family.
00:59:46.000 | It's often better to buy four or six or eight plots altogether when a section of a cemetery is somewhat empty than it is to try and get close spots later.
01:00:00.000 | And cemetery plots are also sort of a commodity.
01:00:05.000 | If you purchase them now and in ten years decide that you want to be cremated because there's only a limited number of cemeteries and cemetery spots, then typically you can sell them for whatever the current rate is.
01:00:23.000 | So that's a reasonable investment.
01:00:28.000 | What about headstones? Is that something that is also just always handled privately, and how would you approach that process?
01:00:38.000 | Some funeral homes will take care of the monuments in-house.
01:00:44.000 | They might sell you one during the arrangements.
01:00:47.000 | Some places have their own engraving set up, or there are monument companies where they send off and get a proof drawing and then have it engraved and shipped in.
01:01:01.000 | We never dealt with that.
01:01:03.000 | It's sort of a high-risk business just because they're expensive, and if you mess it up, you have to redo the whole thing.
01:01:12.000 | That's why we stayed out of it.
01:01:14.000 | But I would recommend finding a private monument sales or going through your funeral director for that.
01:01:25.000 | Usually funeral directors can recommend a local business if they don't personally sell them just because you do get the coverage if something gets messed up.
01:01:37.000 | But like I said, we didn't really deal with selling those.
01:01:42.000 | So, Ben, if you dropped dead of a heart attack today and your family were going to go through and make funeral arrangements for you, being a listener of Radical Personal Finance who values the use of a dollar, also being a funeral director who values the sense of closure and the caring for giving your family an opportunity to celebrate your life, what would your family do?
01:02:11.000 | What services would you buy?
01:02:14.000 | How would your family – what arrangements would you want your family to make?
01:02:19.000 | My arrangements would probably be embalming with an open casket funeral and visitation all in one day followed by the cremation.
01:02:33.000 | And then after that, somebody would throw a heck of a big wine and cheese party, probably without the wine.
01:02:42.000 | But there's no reason why you can't have a very short funeral and then have sort of an event after the fact because really the funeral is for the living.
01:03:00.000 | And I would rather have somebody say, "Hey, Ben went out with style and we had a great time," off his life insurance is what it amounts to, than everybody standing around and crying and having a big stuffy funeral experience.
01:03:19.000 | But that's probably what I would do.
01:03:22.000 | Yeah, I think funerals – it's important to acknowledge them because for many of us, funerals and weddings are where we see people that we haven't seen in a long time.
01:03:31.000 | And in my mind, that's the most valuable thing.
01:03:34.000 | Yes, you want to bring – let me be careful and let me retract most valuable.
01:03:39.000 | That is an extremely valuable aspect to a funeral is to allow and plan for an opportunity that friends and family who will make a special effort to fly into town, that friends and family will have extensive opportunities to visit together and to be together.
01:03:57.000 | And in terms of if I'm planning a funeral for a family member, yes, we need to make sure that we attend to the basics of the ceremony in whatever way seems appropriate to have that traditional opportunity as part of our cultural celebration to have that sense of closure.
01:04:16.000 | I really like your use of that word "memory picture" because I can definitely recognize how valuable that is and that research that you cited would seem to make sense to me based upon my own experience.
01:04:27.000 | But also I want to make sure that it's not all black because people are not going to – you're sitting in pews at a church building or sitting in pews or seats in rows at a funeral director's home and you've got well-trained, somber, young 17-year-old faces in black suits.
01:04:43.000 | It doesn't quite lend that same air of joviality.
01:04:47.000 | People are wanting to be careful of expressing that.
01:04:52.000 | So I would put a significant priority on arranging for a venue and an opportunity that friends and family and distant acquaintances and relatives could have significant time to come together and to be together and to catch up.
01:05:10.000 | That's something I've always enjoyed that the most is that where you can tell stories about the person who's dead, much of the somber atmosphere has been cleared away, and you can just enjoy being with people.
01:05:23.000 | Yeah, I mean if you think back to your – you'd mentioned several family funerals that come to mind. You don't remember the funeral.
01:05:31.000 | I mean nobody remembers the funeral. You remember the fact that, hey, all the cousins got together and we had a great time.
01:05:37.000 | Or, hey, I saw Uncle So-and-so who I haven't seen in 20 years.
01:05:41.000 | That's what people remember. It's not – nobody wants to remember the somber part of it. It's actually the value of family.
01:05:52.000 | I mean the family value of it is what's valuable I guess.
01:05:57.000 | Yeah, absolutely. So Ben, tell us briefly if you don't mind. I didn't ask you in advance if this is okay.
01:06:05.000 | You mentioned that you're transitioning out of the business to pursue some other lifestyle goals.
01:06:09.000 | What do you have planned?
01:06:11.000 | Well, I have a diverse set of skills. I have a funeral director's license obviously.
01:06:17.000 | My other education is in aircraft maintenance, which is kind of the opposite end of the world.
01:06:24.000 | But just personally I have more of a mechanical mind, less of a people person.
01:06:32.000 | So I am going to try and get back into the aircraft industry or something mechanical that I can do with my hands and go from there.
01:06:45.000 | Also my wife wants to move south, so we're headed to the Gulf Coast somewhere I guess.
01:06:53.000 | Great. And final commentary, my experience as an insurance agent and financial advisor when I was previously a financial advisor.
01:07:05.000 | Before getting into the industry, I often came to the perspective and I just said, "Well, insurance agents are out to make the biggest commission possible.
01:07:17.000 | And financial advisors are out to make the biggest commission possible.
01:07:21.000 | So therefore, they're primarily engaged in selling bad products to bad situations and that's bad business and you shouldn't trust those people."
01:07:30.000 | When I got into the industry, my personal experience was not that way.
01:07:35.000 | I think there were probably – I don't know, maybe 10 percent, 5 or 10 percent, maybe less, maybe more. Who knows?
01:07:42.000 | But a small percentage of insurance agents and financial advisors who were that way, they were simply heartless.
01:07:49.000 | They cared only about themselves.
01:07:52.000 | They cared only about the biggest commission that they could get and they didn't have a sense of care for the people that they were working with.
01:08:01.000 | But my opinion is that the vast majority of insurance agents and financial advisors did really care.
01:08:08.000 | They did really care about the people that they were working with, et cetera.
01:08:11.000 | But when faced with the challenge, it's an ethical conundrum to figure out when you're paid based on commission and paid based upon the sale of product to figure out,
01:08:20.000 | "How do I figure out what's the appropriate thing to do?"
01:08:23.000 | And it's not that money doesn't solve – money doesn't weigh into it.
01:08:30.000 | Obviously, it's an easy temptation to calculate, "Well, if I sell this product, I'll make a more higher dollar amount or if I sell this other one, I'll make less."
01:08:38.000 | But my observation was that most people didn't – that wasn't a primary thing.
01:08:42.000 | Yes, you're aware of it because you can't not be.
01:08:44.000 | But you're also aware of the fact that you're trying to serve somebody and it's much more about seeking to listen to somebody and trying to fit their needs and to recognize that the lowest possible cost is not always the highest consideration.
01:09:01.000 | And so you have kind of this real range and this diversity.
01:09:04.000 | And many times insurance agents and financial advisors are looking at things and looking at different information.
01:09:10.000 | And it's very hard from the outside perspective to draw that strong line that I used to draw that, "Well, they're just all scumbags."
01:09:17.000 | Now, with funeral homes, I would imagine the conflicts of interest and the potential conflicts of interest are similar.
01:09:22.000 | Perhaps there's a percentage of people who really don't care and they just want to make as much money as possible.
01:09:28.000 | But it's more of a matter of, as you say, how do you help a family get it, get what they want?
01:09:33.000 | They want to honor their memory.
01:09:35.000 | And so they're in that problem of, "Well, dad didn't – I didn't really like dad very much.
01:09:40.000 | But now at least if I put him in a nice casket, I'll solve that emotional need."
01:09:44.000 | And how do you argue against that?
01:09:46.000 | How do you say that spending an extra $5,000 on a casket is a bad thing if it helps somebody to solve the emotional guilt that they felt towards their father?
01:09:55.000 | How do you figure that out?
01:09:57.000 | I don't know how to figure that out.
01:09:59.000 | And so it's kind of that circumstances and that justification that leads to a mixed bag of perception about somebody like the funeral director business.
01:10:10.000 | Do you think that's accurate, Ben?
01:10:12.000 | Is that your observation or do you see differently?
01:10:15.000 | Yeah, it's hard to find a middle ground there because on the one hand, people are going to do what they're going to do.
01:10:26.000 | I mean if people feel guilt over something, you can't really prevent that.
01:10:37.000 | But then how do you – like I said, it's hard to find an equilibrium.
01:10:45.000 | And I think that – like I said, I believe the funeral home industry as a whole is filled with some of the nicest people that you will ever meet that would go out of their way to take care of any problem that a family that comes to them might have.
01:11:02.000 | I can't answer that question.
01:11:11.000 | It's a philosophical question, which I enjoy thinking about.
01:11:17.000 | It's not easy.
01:11:19.000 | It goes back to that question.
01:11:21.000 | My wife loves to shop at Publix.
01:11:23.000 | She likes to shop at Publix because it's a – as their slogan is, "Where shopping is a pleasure," and she just loves the environment.
01:11:30.000 | It's beautiful.
01:11:31.000 | I go into Publix and I get annoyed by the fact that they – that their stuff costs more than other places.
01:11:39.000 | I don't mind going to the warehouse store or the restaurant supply store because I can save money.
01:11:44.000 | So we've got a deal.
01:11:45.000 | I go to the warehouse store and the restaurant supply store.
01:11:47.000 | She goes to Publix.
01:11:48.000 | It works out.
01:11:50.000 | But I don't necessarily go into the Publix and expect them to say, "Well, we always offer the lowest prices."
01:11:57.000 | They don't.
01:11:58.000 | They're competitive in some categories, but they're selling something different.
01:12:01.000 | So if we don't expect that at the grocery store, my philosophical question is why should we expect that out of a funeral director?
01:12:09.000 | Do they always have to be the lowest price or can they offer high service?
01:12:12.000 | Can they offer high service in a difficult period of time?
01:12:16.000 | Is that unethical?
01:12:18.000 | It's the same thing as an insurance agent.
01:12:21.000 | Do I always have the obligation to tell every single client about the absolute cheapest insurance policy that they can get?
01:12:29.000 | Now, in general, I think good business is to educate your client because you don't want somebody to leave a meeting with you and two weeks later meet with someone else and say – come back to you and say, "Why didn't you tell me about this?"
01:12:42.000 | So I always did my very best to educate somebody and say, "Here are your options.
01:12:47.000 | This is the least expensive option.
01:12:48.000 | This is good in this situation.
01:12:50.000 | Here's the middle of the range," et cetera.
01:12:52.000 | But solving that moral, ethical, philosophical question, I have never found easy.
01:12:57.000 | So you don't have to comment anymore.
01:12:58.000 | I just thought it's a really interesting conundrum that at least the audience can be aware of and consider.
01:13:05.000 | So Ben, thank you for coming.
01:13:07.000 | Go ahead.
01:13:08.000 | Go ahead.
01:13:09.000 | I have two thoughts on that, and I guess this is how I sort of deal with it myself.
01:13:14.000 | First off, as far as paying a company or an individual for something, and it's not just the funeral industry but any service that you're paying for, I always try to say if I were the person getting paid for this, would I want to be paid the way – or how would I want to be paid?
01:13:37.000 | So a lot of things seem expensive on the face of it, but then when you start – like an hourly rate, for example, and you know this, you say, "My hourly rate is such and such," and someone will say, "Well, that's outrageously expensive," and you say, "That's true.
01:13:57.000 | It's expensive.
01:13:58.000 | I pay taxes.
01:13:59.000 | I pay business expenses.
01:14:01.000 | I pay possibly for a building or a structure, repairs and things."
01:14:08.000 | So when it comes down to it, yeah, it's expensive, but it's not like all that's going into an individual person's wallet.
01:14:19.000 | So I try to always keep that in mind.
01:14:22.000 | And then just when I'm selling something, I always try to just simply sell stuff that I would buy because I consider myself a fairly educated consumer, and if it isn't something that I would purchase for whatever reason, whether it's overpriced or undervalued or something, I try not to sell it.
01:14:45.000 | And I guess that's the best answer I can come up with for that.
01:14:50.000 | TABOR: Yeah, and I think that is absolutely good, and the wonderful beauty of the free market system is there's an excellent check and balance on the greed or avarice that a person may have where if your services are unreasonable or if you have done a poor job, somebody else can come in and set up shop right next to you and they can offer services that are discounted.
01:15:17.000 | And so as – when you have the free market system, you have different people who offer things, and as long as they do not operate under a government-granted monopoly, which then leads to inefficiency, but rather they operate under a free market system.
01:15:32.000 | And then as long as we encourage individuals and consumers to shop carefully and whenever possible gather competitive bids, which obviously is difficult in the funeral industry.
01:15:43.000 | One of the kind of the built-in disadvantages that somebody has is they're dealing with personal grief and they're dealing with the pressure of time.
01:15:51.000 | I've got a body and I've got to make arrangements and now I'm off of work and I've got to figure out all of these details, which is why I encourage all of my listeners.
01:16:00.000 | Step in and help family members since you – or help people who are going through it since you can perhaps be a non-emotional, more careful consumer.
01:16:09.000 | You can be a good intermediary and help to protect your friend or family member who's going through a difficult time.
01:16:14.000 | But in the long run, I think we get a generally positive environment because of those two factors where educated consumers and a free market system leads to people being able to choose whatever option they want.
01:16:28.000 | I feel like we've hopefully contributed to that education.
01:16:31.000 | Ben, give us any final thoughts you have if you want to advertise or share information on your funeral home or not.
01:16:38.000 | Go ahead and just give us any closing final thoughts as we go, please.
01:16:41.000 | Just my closing advice is go buy some life insurance and then go to a funeral home and pre-plan.
01:16:48.000 | Don't pre-pay but pre-plan because that will take so much struggle away from your family whether it's now or in 30 years.
01:16:58.000 | At least they have an inkling of what it is that you want and even better, talk to them about it.
01:17:05.000 | That's a great practical tip.
01:17:07.000 | Thank you for coming on the show and we wish you all the best. Thank you for being a member of the Radical Personal Finance community.
01:17:12.000 | We look forward to hearing more of your success as you pursue your career change.
01:17:16.000 | All righty. Thank you for having me on.
01:17:19.000 | This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources.
01:17:24.000 | Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com
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