Preneed: A Pandora's Box of Problems
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…
The cemetery is not dying, it is evolving.
Since its creation in the 1830’s, America’s public cemetery has gone through three major evolutions. When American was an agrarian society, we buried our dead in a small section of the family farm. As towns grew into cities, the public cemetery was created out of necessity. Located…
It would be my assumption that the majority of the country’s cemeteries do not maintain a trust for the maintenance and care of its graves. While this may differ from state to state, most states’ perpetual care statutes exempt small family cemeteries, not for profit cemeteries, municipal cemeteries, county cemeteries and church cemeteries from their…
For several years, the media have been making these dire predictions…
These are tough times for cemeteries. Too many planned on a steady revenues from grave sales, and have not trusted enough funds for future maintenance expenses. Grave sale revenues have been dramatically cut by the public’s acceptance of cremation. Subsequent to the Great Recession of 2008, many of our funeral home clients reported a significant…
Effective July 1st, the cemetery laws of Virginia and Georgia are each amended to authorize fixed distributions from cemetery perpetual care trusts. They join Florida, Tennessee, Michigan, Missouri and Iowa in embracing some form of the unitrust option for cemetery care fund distributions. The unitrust option is a dramatic departure from the net…
Preneed planning often begins with the purchase of a cemetery plot or cremation niche. If that purchase includes a marker or monument, the cemetery will typically seek to deliver the marker so that it may avoid cost increases incurred with regard to granite and bronze. But, many of us do not like to be reminded…
In an unusual move for a death care regulator, the Federal Trade Commission weighed in on the preneed turf war that has erupted between Pennsylvania funeral directors and StoneMor Partners. At the request of the chairman for a Pennsylvania legislative committee, the FTC responded with a detailed letter warning against various bill proposals aimed at…
The International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) made an old but persuasive argument to get the IRS to exempt cemetery care trusts from the Medicare tax that will fund ObamaCare. As discussed in a prior post, the IRS had initially proposed to apply the tax to both cemetery care trusts and preneed trusts. With …
A cemetery operator recently expressed his frustration with the trust officer of his care fund trust. An examination of the trust had cited the operator for inappropriate distributions from principal with regard to expense payments. We suggested to the operator that it is very common for trustees to set up care fund accounts with …