Funeral pre-planning involves making decisions about your funeral or memorial service arrangements in advance, documenting your wishes, and optionally pre-paying for services. It relieves your family of difficult decisions during an emotional time, locks in current prices, and ensures your personal, cultural, and religious preferences are honored.
10 steps across 1 sections
1. Steps Guide
- Decide on disposition — Choose between burial, cremation, green burial, alkaline hydrolysis, or body donation. This fundamental decision shapes all subsequent planning.
- Select a funeral home — Research and compare at least 3 funeral homes. By law (FTC Funeral Rule), they must provide itemized price lists. Compare costs for the same services — prices vary dramatica...
- Choose the type of service — Options include traditional funeral with viewing, memorial service (no body present), graveside service, celebration of life, religious ceremony, or a combination. Docu...
- Select a casket or cremation container — Caskets range from $1,000 to $10,000+. You are not required to buy from the funeral home — third-party sellers (Costco, Walmart, online retailers) often off...
- Plan service details — Choose an officiant, select music, pick readings or scripture, designate pallbearers, choose who delivers the eulogy, select flowers, and decide on photos or memorabilia disp...
- Write your obituary — Draft or outline your obituary with key biographical details, survivors, and service information. This saves your family from trying to recall details during grief.
- Arrange burial or cremation specifics — If burial: purchase a cemetery plot, choose a headstone/marker, select a vault or liner. If cremation: choose an urn, decide on final resting place (columbar...
- Organize personal and financial information — Create a document listing all bank accounts, investments, insurance policies, debts, digital accounts and passwords, and the location of important docu...
- Consider pre-payment options — Options include pre-need funeral insurance, irrevocable funeral trusts, and pay-in-full plans. Understand cancellation policies, transferability, and what happens to ...
- Share your plan — Tell your family, executor, and attorney where the pre-planning documents are stored. The best plan is useless if no one knows it exists.
Common Mistakes
- Not writing anything down
- Pre-paying without understanding the contract
- Using the funeral home's pricing exclusively
- Not considering inflation
- Forgetting digital assets
Pro Tips
- Use the FTC Funeral Rule to your advantage
- Consider a pre-need funeral insurance policy
- Keep an "end-of-life" file
- Review and update every 3-5 years
- Look into veteran's burial benefits