Steps Toward Advanced Arrangements

Most people, when making advanced funeral arrangements, do so for a particular reason. That reason can range from easing the emotion involved with decision-making at the time of death to price protection. The following will show you some advantages to making arrangements in advance and ways to protect yourself during the decision making moments.

When making funeral arrangements in advance there are basically four steps:

1. Vital Records
An important first step when making advanced arrangements is to gather information for a death certificate and obituary. This is essential simply because, for some survivors, the task of finding a social security number, parents names, the cities where other survivors live and more, can involve searching through old papers and contacting distant relatives. At the time of a loved one's death this process can change the focus from coping with grief to worrying about details. For your convenience, use our information form to help you get all of that information together.

2. Funeral Home Selection
Some people will go the next step and decide on a funeral home, the desired services and select a casket, urn or other items of merchandise. Doing this allows you to make your survivors aware of your wishes, and reduces the emotional influences during decision making.

3. Pre-payment
The final step some people will take is to pay for the arrangements in advance. Doing this not only reduces the financial burden of the funeral to the survivors, but with some funeral homes, it allows the cost of the funeral to be locked in, thus guaranteeing the survivors will not have to pay more for the services in the future. The idea is that the investment increases in value, like interest compounding, and the increase goes toward paying any increase in funeral costs caused by inflation. Although these are good reasons for paying for services in advance, you should know that doing so is a personal choice and is not a requirement for making advanced arrangements.

Making arrangements in advance requires you to carefully consider what is best for you.

You have probably heard other funeral homes, cemeteries, crematories and funeral consultants encouraging you to use their services. Those services more often than not involve prepaying for something. At R. Hayden Smith, we have always encouraged gathering and comparing information. Then all you have to do is separate good information from the bad. You may prepay only if you wish.

Compare everything regarding funerals, burials, memorials, vaults and cremation with funeral homes and other providers not under the same ownership. This is important because if a funeral home, cemetery, and crematory, are all owned by the same corporation you may not be receiving non-biased information.

Compare all costs and be absolutely certain what is included in each service before signing anything. This is important because quite often people will begin to compare costs after contracts have been signed only to find that a service or item could have been provided by another reliable provider for a fairer cost. Also, understand that most funeral homes can provide the same vaults and memorials that cemeteries provide.

4. Understand the reason behind any referrals.
Are they being made from a survivor who received the service, or from someone who may receive a commission for making the referral?  At R. Hayden Smith we do not pay a commission to anyone.

Ours has always been a tradition of our family serving your family. We live in this community and serve this community. Serving you means, among other things, providing you with information that is helpful in all areas of grief and loss. If you would like more information, please contact us and we will help you anyway we can.