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When the MFDEA Preneed Portability video disclosed that expense distributions were being paid from the Missouri Funeral Trust to the association, we thought it was appropriate to revisit prior blog posts about the failures of association master trusts in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California.  Those state association master trusts were forced to close, to restructure…

Late in 2021, PNC Bank threw in the towel.  After years of litigation and two appeals, PNC Bank agreed to a settlement with the NPS special deputy receiver.  Last month, our Illinois clients began receiving POC notices from the SDR that a portion of their claims for inflation would be honored.  Payment of funeral home…

A former Kentucky funeral director has been charged with multiple felony preneed thefts, some of which occurred 25 years ago.   Various news sources report that Donald Creech began pocketing consumer preneed payments as early as 1996. The consumer preneed payments were to have been forwarded to the Kentucky Funeral Directors Association’s master trust.   Until he…

In an earlier post we reported how the acting director for the Division of Professional Registration advised the Governor that State Board changes were needed to be made “to increase efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”  Improvements were needed, “especially with inspections and financial examinations”, and that there could be potential cost savings of $200,000.  In a…

On August 30, 2021, the legal saga of National Prearranged Services came to a rather anticlimactic conclusion.  In a relatively short decision, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Richard Webber’s July 2019 judgment that awarded $102,135,393.07 damages against PNC Bank, a successor to the NPS preneed trusts.  The final damages award is a…

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…

In our next post on cemetery preneed, we want to revisit a post from June 2012 (Cemetery Preneed Challenges: bucket accounting).  As discussed in that post, the cemetery prearrangement differs from its funeral counterpart because the cemetery can deliver property and merchandise prior to the purchaser’s death.  When establishing a preneed program, a…

When selling interment rights on a preneed basis, it was once very common for cemeteries to include a forfeiture clause in the sales agreement.  If the consumer used installment payments to pay for a grave space and defaulted on that payment plan, the terms of the contract would declare all payments applied to the contract…

Fall is the time when many cemeteries host their most effective marketing program: voices from the past.

In conjunction with a local community theater, the cemetery will research their “residents” for interesting characters to portray.  The community theater actors will then bring those characters to life during a tour of the cemetery.   These tours generate…