Since the onset of Covid, the death care industry has experienced an uptick in preneed sales.  As witnessed recently on the Bankrate website, the financial planning industry has taken notice.  Bankrate is a website that provides comparisons of various financial products, and recently posted an article titled “The pros and cons of funeral trusts

The New York Times article on funeral planning blurs the line between pre-paying and pre-funding.   The savings accounts discussed by the article are one method of pre-funding funeral costs.   But the POD savings account is far less secure than final expense trusts or final expense insurance policies.  The concern many consumers have is that the

We’re back to that recent New York Times article about funeral planning.  The reporter offers spot on advice about the ‘gaps’ of preneed arrangements.  A surviving parent will frequently advise adult children that they need not worry about his (or her) funeral because they have purchased a preneed contract.  As the article suggests, adult children

Funeral and burial preplanning should be a part of every estate plan, but some web pages promoting estate planning can be misleading or impractical.   The estate planning page sponsored by Lawyers.com suggests that funeral arrangement preferences can be incorporated into a will or health care power of attorney to alleviate the financial and emotional burdens

NPR’s second story on the funeral industry suggests that preplanning a funeral will typically require visits to multiple funeral homes.

NPR led their story with a consumer attorney sharing his frustrations with getting price information from funeral homes near his father.  To the attorney’s surprise, many of the funeral homes did not include general price

A local Kansas City television station recently ran a story about a consumer’s complaint that his preneed contract did not cover “surprise fees”.   The consumer had purchased the preneed contract from a Kansas City funeral home/cemetery combo where he had also purchased a grave space.   One fact regarding the preneed contract that jumped out

A Kansas City Star article reported on the role of the Missing in Action Project in getting Major Rombauer to his final resting place.  Much of the work of the MIA Project goes unreported, but this story was found noteworthy because Major Rombauer’s cremains had been sitting on a shelf at the crematory for 102