Did you see this article from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine? The financial experts at Kiplinger’s encourage adults to take 8 important steps to manage their exit from this life and support their families, “Making arrangements for your final days and beyond isn’t just about helping your family through difficult times. It also lets you designate representatives to make decisions about your care, withdraw money from your accounts to pay your bills and celebrate your existence in exactly the way you want.”
Many of the steps are fairly obvious, though fewer than half of us have managed to take these steps:
- Write a will.
- Consider life insurance.
- Complete critical end-of-life documents.
- Manage finances to avoid probate…
And the final two are to Plan your Memorial or Funeral and to Choose Burial or Cremation. Why are these steps proposed in a financial article? Care of final needs is a substantial cost–with average costs of a funeral and burial in the $10,000 range, some will cost considerably more. By considering how your loved ones might remember, honor, and memorialize you, you can estimate the cost of your final needs.
More importantly, you can plan for them now, and remove the financial burden from your family. Planning can be part of general estate planning, or a solitary effort to address this cost. Planners even have the option of pre-paying the costs of final needs, an insurance policy of sorts, that usually offers a cost-savings. For more details on the benefits of advance funeral planning and prepaid funerals, try this article on Funeral Insurance. Often called a prepaid funeral or prepaid cremation, costs paid in advance are regulated by the insurance industry and may also be called funeral insurance.
Have you considered cost of final needs in your own personal end-of-life planning?
