FUNERAL EXPENSES
The Federal Trade Commission Funeral Rule requires that all funeral homes itemize their charges for professional services, facilities and motor equipment and that they provide a General Price List to all clients. A complete price list of caskets and vaults will also be provided.
What if I do not wish to use all the services a funeral home has to offer?
The goods and services shown on this list are those we can provide to our clients. You may choose only those items you desire. However, any funeral selection you make will include a charge for basic services and overhead. If legal or other requirements mean that you must purchase any items not specifically requested, we will explain the reason for this in writing. This will be shown on the Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected.
Does the price I receive from the funeral home include everything?
Your Family Service Counselor will thoroughly explain all the charges that specifically pertain to the funeral home's goods and services selected. There are often additional charges associated with the funeral which are not direct charges of the mortuary. Many of these additional charges are commonly added to the funeral home contract as “Cash Advances”. As a convenience to you, the funeral home simply “advances the cash” by issuing the checks to the appropriate entity on your behalf. This is a service offered at no charge to you. Cash Advance items that are frequently included on the funeral contract include a cost of death certificates and appropriate filing fee, clergy honorarium, cemetery charges for opening and closing the grave or marker setting, newspaper notices, flowers, and fees for musicians or other paid participants.
What Does a Funeral Director Do?
The number of individual activities that must take place in order for one funeral to be conducted is astonishing. The funeral director is actually an organizational specialist! The following is a condensed list of some of the more visible activities of a typical funeral director:
- Removal and transferring the deceased from place of death to Funeral Home.
- Professional care of the deceased, which may include sanitary washing, embalming preparation, restorative art, dressing, hairdressing, casketing and cosmetology.
- Conduct a complete consultation with family members to gather necessary information and discuss specific arrangements for a funeral.
- File all certificates, permits, affidavits, and authorizations, as may be required.
- Acquire a requested amount of certified copies of the death certificate needed to settle the estate of the deceased.
- Compile an obituary and place in newspapers of a family's choice.
- Make arrangements with a family's choice of clergy person, church, music, etc.
- Make arrangements with cemetery, crematory, or other place of disposition.
- The providing of a register book, prayer cards, funeral folders, and acknowledgements, as requested by a family.
- Offer the assistance of notifying relatives and friends.
- Arrange for clergy honorariums, music, flowers, death certificates, obituaries, additional transportation, etc.
- Care and arrangement of floral pieces and the post funeral distribution as directed by a family.
- Arrange for pallbearers, automobiles, and special services (fraternal or military) as requested by a family
- Care and preservation of all floral cards, mass cards, or other memorial contributions presented to the funeral home.
- Your funeral director, with his/her staff personnel, will direct the funeral in a most professional manner, and be in complete charge of the funeral procession to the cemetery or other place of disposition.
- Assist a family with social security, veterans insurance, and other death-related claims.
- A post funeral meeting, by the funeral director, with a family, to deliver such things as the register book, floral and mass cards, and to ascertain whether or not he/she can be of further assistance.