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Most funeral directors would be hard pressed to calculate what investment return their preneed trust is producing.  Regular deposit and distribution activity makes computation of investment returns difficult.  The more frequent the activity, the harder it is to compute the return.  Accordingly, it would be easier for the funeral director to look at paid in…

As discussed in our prior post, funeral homes are becoming increasingly dependent upon their preneed trustee for individual account administration.  Many trustees that provide account administration rely upon programs that use tax cost basis accounting.  (For a prior discussion of tax cost basis see “Consumer Options and Administrative Hurdles: Market Value Allocations”.)    Tax…

When the Federal Reserve recently announced the end of the quantitative easing program, it did so with a hint that any increase in interest rates could be a considerable time off.  Several global factors may now cause interest rates to remain at unprecedented lows for longer than what the Fed had suggested last December.  As…

The conventional guaranteed preneed transaction is premised upon investment returns offsetting performance cost increases to the funeral home.  Many funeral homes restrict consumers to single payment preneed contracts to limit their exposure to funding short falls.  If the funeral home allows the consumer to pay the preneed purchase price over 60 months, the preneed trust…

Since President Obama unveiled the new MyRA as his plan to revive Americans’ saving habits, we have been making comparisons between funding for retirements and preneed.   Like the MyRA, the non-guaranteed preneed contract could represent more of an introduction to preplanning funding than the final preneed product.  As the AARP acknowledged a few years ago,…