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It’s not hard to imagine the value of preparing a will to make sure your wishes are carried out or taking out life insurance to take care of loved ones left behind. Preplanning a funeral also has value in ensuring that your wishes are carried out after death as well as caring for your loved ones after you are gone. According to a study by the Funeral and Memorial Information Council, 69 percent of adults over 40 would prefer to pre-plan their own service, however only 17 percent had followed through and made pre-arrangements. Here are some ways preplanning your funeral can be valuable to you and your family: 

Reduce the Stress On Your Family: The loss of a loved one can be a stressful time. Since funerals must be planned immediately following a death, this often means that family members must jump into making a myriad of decisions while also dealing with their grief. Preplanning your funeral relieves your surviving loved ones of this burden while making it easier for your family to execute your wishes. Instead of calling funeral homes and comparing prices, they’ll be able to focus their time on supporting each other.

Funeral Preplanning Saves Money: If you plan ahead, you can take the time to compare funeral homes, which often vary in price by thousands of dollars for nearly identical services, saving your loved ones thousands of dollars. Many people don’t think to shop around when they’re grieving and rushing to plan a funeral, which can lead to unnecessary costs. Also, most funeral homes will freeze the price of a funeral at the time it was prearranged. According to The Love Always Project, “Freezing the cost of a funeral varies by state and by funeral home. Talk to your funeral director about locking in the price of your funeral.” Like most other products and services, the cost of a funeral is likely to increase with inflation. Prepaying for your funeral helps freeze the cost of guaranteed services and ends up costing less than it will in the future.

Ensure Your Wishes Are Met: Many people have thoughts about what is important to them surrounding their death. Whether you feel that a burial is important for religious reasons, or you’d prefer cremation with funeral services afterward, preplanning your funeral in advance will help ensure that your wishes will be carried out. This can provide a lot of comfort in your final days. It also gives you a chance to project some of your own personality onto the event and reflect on how you’ll be remembered. A study done by FuneralOne shows that 62 percent of respondents said they want personalization in their funerals. Whether you’d like a somber affair with religious music or a joyful celebration of life, these wishes and desires can be included in the preplanning process. 

Help prevent family conflict: Preplanning your funeral services puts your wishes on the record, removing any potentially difficult decisions at the time of need. If you pass away and you haven’t outlined your funeral wishes, your family will be left to guess what you would have wanted which can lead to unnecessary tension, especially if two or more family members disagree in the funeral planning process. Even if you’ve mentioned your wishes to your family, grief can cloud memory. The more specifics you record now the better. This is also true for detailed funeral decisions, such as what readings you would want or what charity you’d prefer people make memorial donations to. Each decision that you make in advance is one less decision that your family members will need to make and one fewer reason for family tension.

Get Input from Your Loved Ones: Preplanning your funeral services ahead of time allows you to sit down with those you care about and talk through the service options and end-of-life decisions. This will encourage meaningful conversations with your family. People often want to talk about the end of life but don’t know how to bring it up. Freewill.com says, “If you’re unsure of how to bring it up…try a line like, ‘I saw an article the other day on the benefits of planning your own funeral. It made me think about it a bit, and I concluded that…” This allows you the opportunity to bring your loved ones into the conversation.

We hope you found these thoughts on preplanning helpful and informative.

Thanks for reading our blog. You can reach out to us, Wheelan-Pressly Funeral Home and Crematory anytime at 1-309-786-5421 or find us online at wheelanpressly.com