Funeral Costs and Debt Collectors etc..

If you’ve paid attention you’d know my Mother died in February, and then my Grandma died in April.. yeah it’s been a rough year so far, and there’s a whole lot of other extraneous stuff going on as well, but that’s for another day…

The costs for a funeral are ludicrous really… My mom didn’t want much of anything for her funeral, her last wishes were to be cremated and just a viewing for one day only, so that’s what we did. The cost for the funeral, cremation and burial was over $5,000 in total. The viewing was only two hours at the funeral home and a very small service at the chapel at the cemetery.

Now you can pay for the stone up front or in installments but they will not do anything until it’s fully paid for, so if it takes you two years to pay it off, your relative is basically in an unmarked grave for all of that time. I could go into a rant about the whole cemetery thing and how I hate it, but that’s for another time… So it cost us a little over $1500 for the basic stone, now I thought this included words etc, but it really doesn’t and I was never told this when I got the stone. I was called to pick it out, the design, and then I was told it was $20 per letter in addition to what was already on the stone included in the price. My mother was a Mother of course, and a sister and a grandmother. I would have liked to have included at least ‘Grandmother’ on the stone, but at $20 per letter that would be $220 for one word basically and that’s sickening really it is, it’s outrageous the cost. I’ve got a wife and three kids to support and my brother is 13 years younger than me and struggling with his new family so there’s no way either of us could just give up over $200 that easily.

here’s the final stone:

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I took it with my Tilt cellphone, and the picture isn’t that bad…

Also while I was waiting at the initial design meeting I snapped some pictures of the office, there’s not much to it at all:

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Very small and rather bare….

The whole point of this is that it’s a racket, all of it really, these people are cashing in royally on the deaths of our loved ones, and there’s something really wrong with that system that I think needs fixed. Is there such a thing as regulation in the funeral and cemetery industry? If not there needs to be.

Also there needs to be more regulation for companies that call and demand payment as well from the relatives of the deceased… These people are rude and ignorant, and annoying. I did my part and notified the people she owed that she had died. They of course asked me about the estate, and I told them there is none, she was on disability for the last 19 years of her life, and she owned nothing, she did own a house at one time but lost it, and the only things she really owned were her personal belongings and a beat up old car that might have been worth $400. Yet these companies still ask how do I want to pay for her outstanding debts?! They weren’t my debts, and she owned nothing so there is nothing to pay them with. Several of them asked me to send a copy of the death certificate to prove she was dead, and I did that, some of them made me write a letter stating she had no estate as well to pay the debts from. That’s all well and good, but after sending those out, I get mail for my Mother at my house. The one company just transferred the debt to me basically, and I called them up and was like ‘HOLD ON HERE’, luckily it was fixed with no problems, but it’s just the point that I notified them of her death and they decided to just transfer the debt to me… there has to be a law against that somewhere…

There’s one debt collector that I’ve notified several times now that she is dead, can’t recall the name of the company right now, but I called them and told them she had died. Of course I also sent them a death certificate to prove it as well, this company still sends bills to her address even though she’s dead. I’ve collected the bills and sent them back along with a death certificate, and they just send the death certificate back to me and keep sending bills like she’s going to pay them?!? With this company I’ve done this several times now, and they just keep sending the death certificate back to me and sending more bills to her… I don’t get it, do they think she’s going to miraculously come back from the dead and pay them? They’re scum, plain and simple..

I don’t know, it’s a racket and it’s just annoying…