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Sign up for free at radicalpersonalfinance.com/personalcapital. Again, radicalpersonalfinance.com/personalcapital. Here at Radical Personal Finance, one of the major mantras that I consistently repeat to you on the show is to begin with the end in mind. To start with a clear vision of where you're going to end up. Well, guess what?

You are going to end up dead. Either planted in the ground or burned into little pieces. So today, let's talk about death so that you don't put your family in a position where they wind up wasting money trying to figure out what to do with your body. Why don't we have a little radical personal finance discussion about funerals.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with everything that I can think of that might be helpful to you in a quest to live a rich life now while also building and following through on your plans for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host.

A little bit different today, but I'm telling you, I see so many financial mistakes made at funerals and today I want to help you avoid some. I don't often come on Radical Personal Finance and come on the show and appear as the consumerist Nazi railing against consumerism. That's an easy horse to beat and a lot of people beat upon that horse consistently.

That's not really my thing. I think you can decide for yourself what you want to do and what you want to spend your money on and what's important to you. And you're an adult and you can be treated like one. I respect the free enterprise system. I respect people's right to come together under any circumstances that they want to and make whatever voluntary agreements and contracts that they want to make with one another.

I really do. But just because I respect that right and just because I respect your ability and your authority to make any decision that you want, I got to tell you, that doesn't mean that I understand it. And in the United States of America, we have some very strange practices.

I should amend that to say in the Western world, we have some very strange practices regarding burials and funerals. And I just don't get it. I think there are better ways. Again, one of the hallmarks of a modern consumerist culture is that we think that we should just spend money on everything.

And especially when it comes to major life events, we've somehow convinced ourselves that by spending more money on things, we get better results. I see this often when it comes to birth and birthing and marriage and all of these things. People just want to spend lots of money and they associate these events with spending.

Birth of a child, what do people associate with it? Even just past the birth. They associate parenthood with spending money. They associate parenthood with all the stuff that you need, all the stuff that you've got to buy. Just yesterday, on yesterday's show, I recorded and I referred to one of the budget categories that I keep called kid expenses.

The reason I do that is because I don't buy the malarkey that is commonly sold about the cost of raising children. Well, as I recorded that show and published it, all of a sudden this Yahoo! news article pops across from January 9, 2017. Yesterday, I don't know the time stamp on this, but January 9, 2017 from the Associated Press was the annual release from the Department of Agriculture that says the estimated cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610 or as much as almost $14,000 annually.

It came out Monday. I didn't even know it was coming out. We'll deal with that another day, but the point is that's a bunch of baloney. Although I'm not arguing the data, I'm arguing how you measure it and saying that that's a choice that's up to you. We'll deal with that story another day.

The point is that people associate children and the raising of children with money. I'm not saying you don't need some money, but children don't first and foremost require money. This starts from the very beginning. Similar things with marriage. I've received lots of email feedback and what was it? One of the pieces of email that I got are questions that I got from somebody with regard to the health savings account shows that I did where I talked about how these Christian health care ministry organizations have rules.

One of the rules that many of them have is that they will not pay for the expenses of children if those children are conceived and born out of wedlock, that they'll only pay for the birth of babies. Those are only publishable expenses if those children are conceived within marriage of a man and a woman.

I received an email from someone that said that just doesn't seem fair, let alone not only the moral thing, but he says, "Some people want to get married, but they just can't afford it yet." Now I understand why this listener feels that way because you would often get that perception that somehow people aren't getting married because they can't afford it.

I have a family member who, this family member, they've been together, man and woman, they've been living together for going on a decade now. High school, got together right after high school, living together going on a decade now. Evidently, one of the major things is that they haven't really been able to afford to get married.

But remarkably enough, both of them now earn six-figure incomes and yet they still somehow can't scratch around and find the money to get married. Strange, huh? It might be something more than money. It doesn't cost that much to get married. First of all, if you decide, it doesn't cost anything unless you decide you want to go and apply for a license with the state.

If you do want to go and apply for the license with the state, it's – I didn't look up the fees in preparation for the show. I don't know what, a hundred bucks, something like that? It's not that much money. But in our modern consumerist culture, we associate the life event with the money.

And we do the same thing with death. So today, I want to just work to give you some ideas, maybe give you some inspiration that there are other alternatives open to you. That you don't necessarily have to trot out and plunk down 10 grand when you die or your family doesn't have to do that for you.

Or you don't have to do that when your family members die or plunk down 30 grand or 50 grand or whatever the number ends up being. If you want to do that, that's your choice or it's someone else's choice for you. But don't think that you've got to do that.

One of my major desires is to see so many things that have become consumerized and commercialized brought back into a different culture. I want as much as possible in life to be based and centered around my home. And my hope is to inspire and to encourage you to do the same, to bring some of these things back under your own jurisdiction.

What's the point of arguing for more freedom if you don't use the freedom that you have? I confess I probably spent too much time arguing for more freedom without teaching people to use the freedom that they already have. And you can take back control of many of these important events of your life.

From birth through death. There's no reason in the world why you can't have your babies at home. My wife and I have. Now there are medical reasons why at some point in time that would be ill-advised, certainly. But in general, there's no reason why you can't have your children at home.

And one of the things that my wife and I learned when we have had our children at home is that it has dramatically changed my conception and my perception of childbirth. Prior to having children, I always associated childbirth with what I saw in shows on TV and shows and movies.

Very kind of stressful and strange occurrence. When you bring it back home, it is, you know, the nights of our children's births for us are some of the most special and intimate and joy-filled experiences that we look back on and appreciate. So you can research that. You can investigate that now because in the context of childbirth, we're deeply concerned with the health of a mother and a baby that I don't think we should prioritize first and foremost finances.

We should first and foremost prioritize the health and care of a mother and a child. But that doesn't mean that finances should be ignored. You do that at your peril. People often set up this false dichotomy. They set up a dichotomy and say, "Well, you either care about the health of a mother and child or you care about saving money and being cheap." That's simply not the case.

My hope is that going on from birth that many of you will see the value and the benefit of having your family integrated together in a household. A household filled with a loving family is the perfect place to raise mature, responsible children to adulthood. You don't have to buy that done.

You don't have to commercialize that. So many people start first when thinking about their children and the raising of their children. They first start and say, "Well, what can I buy? Where do I go to buy an education?" And they start shopping it on a consumerist basis. And even those of us who are outside of the mainstream, we're guilty of this too.

"Well, maybe the Waldorf is better or is it Montessori or perhaps Charlotte Mason? Well, wait a second. I don't think any of these things." And we start shopping like consumers for it. The reality is you can't buy an education. That's something that's got to be worked for and learned.

You can change the environment. You can stimulate and inspire children in different ways. But you can't buy an education. Don't look at it as a consumerist thing. That continues on through elementary school, high school, college. It's all a bunch of consumerism, people trying to buy things. And it's really healthy to pull back from that and think differently.

It's a great scene in – what is it? Goodwill Hunting where Matt Damon is – the scene where he's in a bar. Look it up on YouTube at some point. It's somewhat obscene in terms of the language but it's very powerful. He's in a bar and he's being teased by some hotshot Harvard so-and-so.

And the quote goes something along the lines of, "You're paying $250,000 for something you could have got with a couple of years at the local library and $22 in late fines." By focusing on choosing in a consumerist way the education, we often miss out on the true benefit which is the process of the education.

Similar things with other life events. I mentioned marriage. Why do weddings have to be expensive? I've never understood. Why on earth do we tell young couples, "Hey, listen. It's going to be your big day, right? Here, Mr. Bride, Mrs. Bride. It's going to be your big day. This is your big day.

So therefore what you should do for your big day is you should throw a huge party for all of your friends to come and have fun. You should pay for it. You should design it. You should organize it because after all, it's to celebrate you." In our modern culture, that often comes with high expenses, often comes with debt.

So therefore, you should start your marriage spending the first few years of your marriage paying off the bills for a wedding which was a party that you threw for other people to enjoy celebrating your marriage. It makes no sense whatsoever. Now, at least in some cultures, there's a tradition in the context of wedding gifts to give money which is in some ways the ticket entrance to the wedding.

The wedding gifts aren't a new blender in a new set of china. The wedding gifts are envelopes filled with cash. That's really good. That's better. But why do brides and grooms pay for it at all? Why does it have to cost $10, $15, $20, $30, $40, $50, $60,000? Everybody benefits from that deal who sells services.

But does the person who matters most, the bride and groom, do they benefit? Why can't you have a simple marriage celebration in a house? Why can't it be a well-coordinated and well-organized potluck? I'm not saying that's got to be done. Many parents thoroughly enjoy throwing a huge party for their children.

Fine. But don't automatically assume that you got to go out and buy a wedding. It's the silliest thing ever. You can have a fantastic celebration with your friends if you approach it in a different way. What about the care for elders? Many of us will be facing that in the next decade.

Caring for parents who are aging, is that something where we automatically start by saying, "Well, what can I buy?" That's important to consider and it's important to consider the finances of it. But do you really need to start with shopping or can you think differently? My hope and my goal – many people do this just out of necessity.

But I think it shouldn't be done just out of necessity. It's not always practical. But my hope is that as my parents age, that they can always remain in my home or in a home of one of my siblings, surrounded by their children and their grandchildren, sewing in – and perhaps – you never know, great-grandchildren.

Sewing into those future generations, not sequestered away in something that we've purchased. Now, medically speaking, that's not always possible. But if you start with those types of things as goals and things that are important, you can plan for that. Which brings us to death. Why does death have to be one of the most expensive times?

Oftentimes, you cap off a long and expensive illness by an expensive funeral. Are there other ways? And should we seriously consider other ways? I think of a friend of mine and a neighbor and this happened in the not-too-distant past. But this friend and this neighbor, long-time neighbor, they never had a lot of money.

The husband was living on disability for a major portion of his lifetime. I didn't know much about their finances until the last few years. But the husband was living on disability. Very small check. The wife had gone back to work after the husband had become disabled. But she didn't have any significantly marketable job skills.

Just very small ability to earn an income. At times, she was working as a cashier at a grocery store. At other times, she was doing simple housecleaning and eldercare. And she was working throughout her 70s and into her 80s. The husband started to experience more and more Alzheimer's. And at some point in time, I became aware of the fact that they were struggling with their house.

That they were behind on their debts on their house. And so I offered my services and sat down with them. And we spent time discussing their finances. And to share the story succinctly, I found out that the previous couple of decades had basically been a disaster financially. I did some forensic accounting and I undid various financial transactions in which this couple had been really taken advantage of in my opinion by unethical mortgage brokers who were refinancing their mortgage in non-advantageous ways.

And they had spent money. They had received small inheritances and they had just spent it unwisely. And basically, they had no money. And they were in the process of foreclosure. Now, we forced all the foreclosure as long as possible. But then their house was foreclosed. And fast forward a little bit of time.

They went to live with family and worked through some of those things. Well, a couple of years later, the husband died. Now, I had been aware of their finances. I hadn't been close to them after they moved away. But I went to the funeral. I just wanted to cry at the cost of what I knew the funeral cost.

The fancy casket, the full suite of vehicles and the funeral procession and the procession in the church building and the graveside ceremony and all of it. It's just massive money. Huge money. And I thought, "Why? Why? Isn't there another way?" And I often get very frustrated by this, by the litany of requests that we all receive.

It seems like when somebody dies, the first thing that we got to do is make a GoFundMe page to pay $20,000 of funeral expenses. What if we could cut that and just give the $20,000 to them to pay for some of the other expenses such as having some time to grieve, such as some of the medical costs?

Why do we have to spend $10,000, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 on a funeral? I get so sick of it. I hope that doesn't sound like I'm complaining. I don't want to complain. But it just seems like, especially me, coming from the life insurance business, I get so frustrated. Buy life insurance.

One more group of people, the firefighters, the police, out standing on the street with a boot, raising money for Officer So-and-so who was killed and he had two little kids. A million bucks, a term life insurance, it costs you about $17 a month. Buy some life insurance. And I'm going to pick on you police officers and firefighters.

You guys are the worst. I had a few of you as clients. You guys are the worst because you sit back and you got the tough guy bravado act of "I'm not going to die" and don't go and buy a million bucks of life insurance. Buy five million if you got the income for it.

It's so silly when you don't get charged a bit extra for your supposedly dangerous job that actuarially is not dangerous. Thus, you can get great life insurance rates and you don't buy tons of it. It's frustrating because it's heartbreaking because then we add on this layer of service and service to the community and it pulls at our heart strings and whatnot.

Buy life insurance. You might get killed in the line of duty and then the police union and whatnot or the firefighters union, yes, you'll have that there. But you might also just die of a heart attack and die on your way to work just like a lot of people.

So buy life insurance. If you know if there's someone in your family who's a police officer or a firefighter who's too macho to go and see an insurance agent, you buy it for them. And we're talking 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks a month. It's meaningless in light of the massive incomes that many high-ranking police officers and firefighters can earn.

Anyway, forgive my emotion. It's just very frustrating. So and so sergeant such and such is dead and now his family and his widow and his children are bereft of income. They're going to get kicked out of their house and simple planning. Anyway, let's talk about funerals. So let's start there.

Forgive me for my emotion. Make sure there's money available when you die. Good simple planning can do that. Life insurance should be a cornerstone of good simple financial planning. I'm of the firm opinion that there is – that everybody is well-served by having some permanent life insurance that is guaranteed to be enforced when you die.

If you're younger, you can have tons of term life insurance to cover those expenses. But even if you're older, make sure you've got some life insurance enforced so that even if you spend all your money, even if you have all the money that gets used up in an elder care situation, etc., at least there's some life insurance there to pay for your final expenses.

The reason why people spend so much money on funerals is because they want to honor properly the memory of the person that they care about. Is there anything wrong with this? No, absolutely not. Similar thing with weddings. Why do people spend so much money on weddings? Well, we want to honor the person.

I remember when I went and bought an engagement ring for my wife and I was trying to make thoughtful decisions, trying not to spend too much money and trying to consider. But the advice and guidance in the world of engagement rings is very, very – it's hard to find good advice.

And the challenge is that you get young male pride involved. And the first thing you know that if – the first thing your fiancé is going to do when she tells people, "I'm engaged," she's going to hold her finger up and she's going to hold the ring up and she's going to say, "Hey, look.

Look, look, look. I'm engaged." And with me being Mr. Financial Big Shot, I never wanted to be embarrassed when she did that. Well, in hindsight, it was silly. But now with a little bit more maturity, with a little bit more of the reality of just considering the fact that what I value is the relationship with my wife, not the ridiculous rock, which has a whole horrible history in and of itself.

If you ever want to study the history of engagement rings and why we even do that in the first place. The point is that there was pride involved. I didn't want her to be beginning her marriage by thinking that she was marrying a deadbeat who couldn't afford a nice ring.

And I just remember that intense pressure sitting there and saying, "Well, I love her. I really love her. I can spend the money. So maybe I should." Now I tried to get a good deal and I think I did. But today, I'm happy. She has a ring. It's fine.

But it doesn't mean as much. I don't love her more or less or she doesn't know that I love her more or less because of the size of the engagement ring. Consider all of the difficult marriages from many large celebrities. Very large engagement rings, seemingly very short marriages. And yet consider perhaps other people you've known, minimal or non-existent engagement ring or grandmother's heirloom passed down and very long marriages.

There's no correlation between these two things. So with funerals, similar thing. People want to make sure that they're honored. So if you know that's going to be the case, then plan appropriately for it. This should be one component of your discussion in advance to say, "Here's what I want to do." Now to get to the point of some of the details of this, the best thing to do is to make your own specific plans.

I've been doing this. I'm kind of revisiting all of my estate planning documents and things like that. Here's kind of a Valentine's Day gift to make sure that everything is updated. I like to do that. I think it's very loving as a Valentine's Day present. Very, very romantic by the way as well.

Very romantic to present proper papers and things like that to your wife. I really encourage that. Much more romantic than flowers and chocolate and things like that. Hopefully, you have a wife that will understand and will agree with that. But as I've been revising this, I realized, "Okay. I need to go ahead and lay out what I want for a funeral." This is one of the simplest things that you can do is help your family to understand what you would actually want.

If you don't give guidance in advance, then your family has to think of what you would want. Because they don't want to tarnish your memory, they're going to go and choose a little bit above and beyond. If my wife had told me in advance before becoming engaged, "Hey, Joshua.

Listen. I don't actually care that much about having a nice engagement ring. What I'd really like you to do is to take the money and spend that on me in this way," then I could have gone and made some kind of – I could have felt confident in buying a cheap ring and saying, "I'm going to spend the money on my wife on this way because I know that's what she wants." So in the same way, using that metaphor, if you tell your family and lay out for your family what it is that you want in advance, they'll be confident enough to make the appropriate decisions.

So as I've been thinking about this and doing a little bit of research, let me just tell you – I'll just tell you what I want. I'll tell you about some options for you. If you want good guidance on funeral, how to interact with funeral homes and things, we'll do more of that in the future.

But for me, I don't care, especially not at this point. Who knows? When I'm old and 100 years old, maybe I'll be different. But today, I don't care about any of the fancy memorial funeral stuff. I just want to be stuck in the ground in the simplest, cheapest way possible and I want my family and friends to have an opportunity to get together and to enjoy time together and to celebrate me and what my life meant.

That's it. I'd much rather if the normal cost is going to be $15,000, if we can do it for $1,000, I'd much rather the extra $14,000 be in the hands and the pockets of the people that I love or be given away to do some more good than just going to buy expensive fancy stuff that doesn't mean anything to me.

So I've often had this interesting experience with kind of just interest in how can you do this cheap. Can you, for example, make your own casket? The answer is yes. Can you, for example, bury your loved ones or be buried on your own property? The answer is yes. Do you need to actually be embalmed?

The answer is no. Do you need to actually interact with any kind of funeral people, official licensed morticians? The answer with the exception of a few states is no, you don't. So I'm going to walk you through some of these things to hopefully give you some ideas that will be helpful to you so you can have some conversations.

My goal today is to motivate conversations and research. Before we get to more of these practical ideas, forgive me for getting a little bit off of my track. Paladin registry. Paladin registry is my best attempt to answer the problem many of you have, which is, "Joshua, I know I'd probably like to get a financial advisor.

I like listening to you. I like hearing the insight of a financial advisor, but I don't know where to get a good one." Tough question. Tough problem. It's not easy. But it can become easier if you start by searching from a pool of qualified financial advisors. That's what Paladin registry is.

They're a registry service. Financial advisors apply to be part of their registry and they have to pay a fee. Now, Paladin goes through and rigorously vets and researches all of these advisors. They research any disciplinary actions. They research their qualifications. They research their business practices, their models, et cetera, and they assign a numerical rating to those things.

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But you can at least start with some good candidates to interview. That's how you should approach it. You should approach finding a financial advisor as an interview process, as if you were hiring them to work for you because guess what? You're hiring them to work for you. So go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin, P-A-L-A-D-I-N, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin, or just click the link at RadicalPersonalFinance.com or in the show notes blog post for today's show.

That will forward you through to a landing page where you put in your name and your address information and the amount of money you have, et cetera. Then what Paladin will do is they'll get in touch with you and they'll refer to you several financial advisors, sometimes two or three usually, that you can start your search with.

I've had very good results from many of you. I've said, "Hey, we found people that were qualified." Not all the time are the financial advisors radical. They're probably – I'm a unique person in the sense of radical. They're not necessarily radical, but they're ethical and they're qualified and they're competent.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin. Let me do the other add to personal capital. Yesterday, I did a show on budgeting. I use YNAB for my personal budgeting for my checking accounts, but I do not use any other thing else other than my checking account in YNAB. I use personal capital as one of my dashboards to be able to see all of my assets, track investment performance, to be able to see those types of things, to be able to see where the accounts are.

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Get a free account at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/PersonalCapital. Again, totally free, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/PersonalCapital. Please use that tracking link so I get credit for your traffic. Thank you. All right. Process of burial. The stress that you experience with the process of burial will probably be related to whether the death is expected or unexpected.

There's a big difference between the funerals of people who are old and likely to die soon versus those who die at a young and unexpected time. Generally, older people know they either need to plan their funerals. It's often one of the things that you're – again, you're meeting with a financial advisor.

Go ahead and plan the funerals. Many times, older couples, especially responsible people, will go ahead and go through and prearrange and usually prepay for many of their circumstances. That's really good because then you know that you, if you're the older person or your parents, they're making the decisions and they're going through this planning process.

That's frankly one of the best ways to do it. The funeral homes specialize in this. They do a good job. You can buy the burial plots. You can buy all of the stuff and pay for it all up front. That's different than people who face the unexpected death of somebody at a younger age, whether this is a car accident, heart attack, et cetera.

Usually there, the family is reeling and trying to figure out what to do. That's really tough because many people haven't thought about death. They haven't thought about funeral preparations and they're going through it for the first time in an intensely stressful time. So let me just give you – I'm going to give you a number of tips and they're going to range from mainstream to pretty radical.

For example, we'll cover home funeral and home care of the body and burial in your backyard. We'll cover that towards the end. We'll start with a little bit more mainstream. You can individually work through each and every stage of the process. If you're going and meeting with a funeral director, they'll walk you through your options.

Everything has a cost. A simple example, traditional funerals often have a memorial service and there's often a graveside service. Well, there's an extra cost. You don't have to do a graveside service or you don't have to do a traditional large big building service. These are your options. So think in advance.

Is there value to one or is there value to the other? Caskets, you can purchase your caskets through the mortuary that you're working with or mortician that you're interacting with, the funeral home. Or you can go to Costco or Walmart and buy caskets. You can do a DIY build casket.

You can find plans on the internet. You can buy cheap caskets online and those options are available to you. And the funeral home cannot refuse to use any caskets. So one of the simplest things to do is do a little bit of price shopping on caskets. You can find out what's available to you at the funeral home and then go to Costco.com.

You can look on Costco. You can look at the Walmart website and you can look at your options and see what's available to you for your casket choice. The cheapest option you're going to find at Walmart or Costco is going to be about a thousand bucks for a casket.

They'll go up from there. You should make sure that you – if you're in the situation and it's your family member or if you're working with somebody, you should always make sure there's somebody with you who is emotionally disattached from the deceased person so that they can go through and they can do the bargaining and they can pull things out point by point.

So you have the power to use your own casket. So again, a thousand bucks for cheap ones that look as good as anything else at Costco and Walmart. You can find cheaper ones online. You can buy – for me, I'd rather – probably because it fits my nature to not go along with the flow.

I prefer to be buried just in a simple pine box. I prefer somebody – my family build it. I found casket coffin plans online for as little as five bucks. I'll link to that in the show notes for today's show. But you can go from – and you can buy from a website called piedmontpinecoffins.com.

You can find coffin plans there for five bucks and the wood and materials will cost you under $200. You can make a simple plywood coffin for yourself. So if you are handy with wood or if you know somebody and you need to bury somebody cheap, then consider that option.

Build it out of plywood. Buy some $5 plans and build it out of plywood for about 200 bucks. They also at that site, Piedmont Pine Coffins, their DIY coffin plans, they also just use some other boards that are a little bit fancier looking that you can buy at Lowe's and it will add a little bit of money but not much.

You can buy coffins at Piedmont Pine Coffins. They sell handmade simple coffins. You can buy coffins that are made online for as little as about $400. I found a website called the Kent Casket Company. I think it's kent, K-E-N-T, casket.com. They charge $431 for a simple pine box. That includes shipping.

So they'll ship you a simple pine box. So there's a great way of saving some money. I guess I'll need the extra large which will probably be a little bit bigger in order to fit me into it. But a great way to save money. If you actually go piecemeal through the process of figuring out the process of burying, all the different stages involved, what you find is that you can actually do many of the things yourself or you can bypass many of the traditional ideas that people use.

When somebody buys, you don't have to have the funeral home be the one to pick them up and take care of the details. You can have them taken right to the morgue. You can take them right to the morgue yourself. The key with the preservation of a body is refrigeration.

And so often you want to refrigerate the body as quickly as possible. You can bypass so many parts if you're inclined. Actually, let me just jump right to the radical aspects of it. Number one, in every state in the United States, you have the right to control all or almost all of the process.

In Florida, anyone can order a death certificate that doesn't include the cause of death. So if I want a death certificate that doesn't include the cause of death, anybody can order that. If it needs to show the cause of death and it needs to be a spouse or a family member or a legal representative, but you can order the death certificate.

It's fairly simple.