12 ms·

How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

roflchoppa 11y ago
Almost all the funerals I've been to, the person is cremated. I had this strange experience when this past summer when my buddy died and his body was placed into a mausoleum. Later on when we were back in the area (LA), my other friend asked me if I wanted to go back to his mausoleum to see him. I never understood the desire to go back to those places, its almost if one is not wanting to let go of the death that took place.
stevesearer 11y ago
I temped in a sales office for a cremation company a number of years ago and it was a very interesting experience. You can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated. This can save your family the trouble and heartache of shopping around for a good deal as well as debate/drama over what to do with your remains. From what I understand, it is also easy to be upsold on burial packages when you're grieving so pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket.
- tamana 11y ago
  Pre-buying (or at least pre-committing) to your wishes is important. Some religions even have religious-legal protections against some coffin upsells.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  >>> pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket. It's also a great time for old people to commit their families to expensive and unnecessarily elaborate funerals. I know of one woman who was sold a "storage" plan because she wanted her funeral to happen "in the summer". It took a lawsuit to void that illegal contract. These deals also cause difficulties when people die while travelling. Rather than cremating them locally and transporting ashes, I've seen ridiculous clauses for the funeral home to send people to collect and return the body. Whenever a business targets old people, assume shady dealing. Free advice: Never make a funeral home a beneficiary to a will. Pre-buy only for fixed costs. Do not commit to anything without an absolute fixed price. Never give a funeral home any access to your accounts no matter how often they claim doing so will make things "simpler" after your death. And talk to your kids about the finances. Funerals are not fun. Fancy flowers cannot change that. Nobody who cares will remember them.
- diogenescynic 11y ago
  My grandpa pre-paid for his cremation through the Neptune Society.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  > You can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated. Even if your next of kin disagree and want a traditional burial for your body? People can be assholes and disregard your final wishes if they think their upholding some kind of tradition/religious principle.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  My great grandma died at 94. She prepaid her entire funeral, bought the plot, picked out the dress she was to be buried in, and prepaid for everyone to eat afterwards (not sure how that part worked out but she did).
jjoe 11y ago
I understand that the choice/decision to cremate the self is personal. But I think it stops where the personal starts affecting us all. Is cremation that negligible of an issue for the environment?
- gambiting 11y ago
  Burying in a coffin requires wood and precious land space. What else do you propose? Burial at sea? A boat that would take your body there would also burn oil. I mean, there's a million more wasteful things that you can complain about, other than how we dispose of our bodies after death.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    Why not just liquify bodies with chemicals and then flush them down the drain?
    - outworlder 11y ago
      Down the drain? As in, the city's waste treatment plant? I for one don't want to drink liquefied brains.
      - smileysteve 11y ago
        ... Where do you think fish biodegrade to? Eventually bodies make it to the ground, which then eventually make it to the air...
        kweinber 11y ago
        "Where do you think fish biodegrade to?" Soylent 1.5, that was just before they switched to algal oil. I wonder what Soylent 3.0 will be made of?
      - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
        Is that worse than drinking liquefied shit? Because that's also going into the waste treatment plant, and in far larger quantities than even large-scale corpse disposal would produce. Every molecule of H20 you've every drunk has been part of a disgusting biological process at some point. But homeopathy isn't real; the water doesn't remember.
dankohn1 11y ago
I comparison shopped for my grandmother's cremation a decade ago. I think she would have appreciated the effort. She had already purchased a cemetery slot, so the only question was how to transport her ashes there. The low bidder sent a hearse about 100 miles to get her body, and was easy to deal with on the phone (and took credit cards).
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Why is a hearse needed to transport (presumably an urn of) ashes?
  - dankohn1 11y ago
    Hearse to transport the body to the crematorium. The ashes were put in a styrofoam box.
    - CWuestefeld 11y ago
      My parents are part owners of a funeral home. The hearse is only ceremonial, e.g., for bringing a casket from the funeral ceremony to the cemetery. At least in their locale, most funeral homes do not even own their own hearse, but rent one as needed. For picking up bodies, like from the hospital or whatever, they've got a regular van.
stcredzero 11y ago
Even more troubling, in the Internet age, funeral parlors tend to make pricing hard to find. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission allows funeral homes to keep their rates hidden until someone actually writes or calls a funeral home representative -- leaning on regulations last updated in 1994 -- rather than pushing funeral homes to let the customer compare online. How about a company where you can subscribe to get such prices? The company runs something like a call center where software gives employees assignments to periodically inquire about prices, which are then posted to the database? This would cover prices for more than just cremations, of course.
- dsp1234 11y ago
  FTA: "This post is adapted from the blog of Parting, a Priceonomics customer." From http://www.parting.com http://www.parting.com: "Find trusted funeral homes near you to compare quality and prices"
  - shostack 11y ago
    This should really be higher. The entire post is a content marketing/native advertising placement. But that's the only new publisher business model that seems to work these days.
- lawpoop 11y ago
  There is the Funerals Consumer Alliance. https://www.funerals.org/ https://www.funerals.org/ I think the chapters are all locally run. I went to a local meeting when my mom had terminal cancer. They had a list of local funeral homes with guaranteed prices, and had some agreement with FCA to honor the prices.
cglace 11y ago
Years back, there was a cremation place in Georgia that had its cremation machine break. It was too expensive to fix so the guy just kept accepting bodies. He would drive them to his property and just dump them. It was a pretty huge case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  "Between 1996 and the date of the discovery, more than 2,000 bodies had been sent to Tri-State. The search ultimately recovered 339 uncremated bodies. Of the 339 bodies that were discovered, 226 were identified." How long did they expect to keep that up? I could conceive of them doing it for maybe a year and then buying a machine but it seems that, at least to them, it became business as usual.
  - LordKano 11y ago
    I remember when this was a breaking story. At first, they claimed that some bodies had been improperly stored as they were awaiting repairs to the retort. Then, when the scope of the issue became known, I wondered the same thing. How long did they think they could keep stacking bodies without anyone noticing them? I don't believe they ever thought that far ahead.
    - kweinber 11y ago
      I saw a presentation on it done by one of the officials who did the cleanup (he was actually the same guy in charge of body recovery in Kosovo death camps, brought in because Tristate was so grisly) . He explained that the guy who ran the place was slow (mentally handicapped) ... He came from a good family, who ran the facility responsibly until the father died and he took over. . He wasn't a creep or a cheat, just was not mentally equipped to handle the responsibility.
      - rpgmaker 11y ago
        Wow, thanks for the background on that. He must've been way more handicapped than anyone thought though.
ergothus 11y ago
Somewhat topical story: A co-worker was part of a jogging group (this was in Virginia, USA), and one of their members died after a fight with cancer. He wanted his ashes to be spread in the Botanical Gardens, where they ran. But said Botanical Gardens had rules denying this (don't recall if it was hygiene, environmental, or just not wanting to open the door to piles of ash). So the group somberly gathered, took his ashes, divvied them up among a collection of plastic bags, poked some holes, and went for their normal jog around the park. At the end the bags had only bits of bone too big to fit through the holes left. (Turns out cremation doesn't result in ONLY ash). I haven't decided if this was a triumph of individual respect over bureaucracy, or a blatant disregard for the commons.
- refurb 11y ago
  Turns out cremation doesn't result in ONLY ash You actually end up with large, intact bones after cremation. They actually take the bones and grind them up into finer particles. I've never seen cremation, ashes, but I've been told they look similar to gravel.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    The process as I understand it: (1) Prep the body by cutting out anything that will harm the cremator, specifically pacemakers with potentially explosive batteries. (2) Fire. (3) Sift through the ashes/bones for any metal (hips/metal screws) (4) Macerate remaining bits into homogeneous ash.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      My dad left his artifical knees to his children when he died. My sisters didn't want them, so I got them. They're mildly interesting. They're great if you have someone who fiddles around with stuff on your desk and doesn't stop when asked. "What's this?" "My dead dad's knee. That dust? That's my dead dad."
  - stevesearer 11y ago
    They do look similar to gravel/sand. And something that was surprising to me (although probably shouldn't have been) is that the weight of the remains definitely differs depending on the size of the person.
threefour 11y ago
If you're interested in learning more, this is a great book on the entire process and industry, a rare critical view from inside: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-your-eyes http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-yo...
MonadQueen 11y ago
One problem that can cause price differences is obesity. 2/3rs of Americans are overweight or obese, and it is much more difficult, expensive, and potentially dangerous, to cremate a person who has a bodyfat percentage of 40% or more. See http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/520833/Cremation-obese-57-stone-funeral-home-fire http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/520833/Cremation-obese-5... Funeral Homes should only have to post rates for people with body fat percentages of 25 and below. And they should be allowed to charge more for the fat. Otherwise families of people who were not obese would be subsidizing obese lifestyle choices.
woebtz 11y ago
Semi-related, it's hard to imagine being defrauded out of cremation remains, but it's apparently quite likely to happen during pet cremations (due to the cost to run the machines, multiple smaller pets are processed at the same time and you won't necessarily get back what you sent). This Freakonomics episode goes into more detail: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of-stevie-the-cat-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of...
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> And the lower range cremation prices are likely to attract additional business. They are loss leaders. "If it's under $1000, they're probably losing money. You really don't make much profit on the direct cremation alone," Jung says. "They're just trying to get you into the door." How on earth can incinerating a human body require $1000 worth of consumables, even factoring in the pay for the operator and other employees?
rattray 11y ago
If anyone is interested in working on this, I am connected with an "industry veteran" (has owned dozens of funeral homes and similar institutions across the country) working on an "Uber of cremations". My email is in my profile.
- newman314 11y ago
  This seems strange. While I think price transparency is good, I'm not quite sure what incentive a funeral home would have in participating since essentially it would be a race to zero.
jack9 11y ago
> People have been buried in coffins for centuries, so why the rise in cremations? > The Cremation Association took a look at this question Why would anyone need to "take a look". We don't have room for all the bodies and internment has (always?) been more expensive than cremation.
dschiptsov 11y ago
Look at traditional Hindu communities - they have all the answers.)

Almost all the funerals I've been to, the person is cremated. I had this strange experience when this past summer when my buddy died and his body was placed into a mausoleum. Later on when we were back in the area (LA), my other friend asked me if I wanted to go back to his mausoleum to see him. I never understood the desire to go back to those places, its almost if one is not wanting to let go of the death that took place.

stevesearer 11y ago

I temped in a sales office for a cremation company a number of years ago and it was a very interesting experience. You can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated. This can save your family the trouble and heartache of shopping around for a good deal as well as debate/drama over what to do with your remains. From what I understand, it is also easy to be upsold on burial packages when you're grieving so pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket.

tamana 11y ago
Pre-buying (or at least pre-committing) to your wishes is important. Some religions even have religious-legal protections against some coffin upsells.
sandworm101 11y ago
>>> pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket. It's also a great time for old people to commit their families to expensive and unnecessarily elaborate funerals. I know of one woman who was sold a "storage" plan because she wanted her funeral to happen "in the summer". It took a lawsuit to void that illegal contract. These deals also cause difficulties when people die while travelling. Rather than cremating them locally and transporting ashes, I've seen ridiculous clauses for the funeral home to send people to collect and return the body. Whenever a business targets old people, assume shady dealing. Free advice: Never make a funeral home a beneficiary to a will. Pre-buy only for fixed costs. Do not commit to anything without an absolute fixed price. Never give a funeral home any access to your accounts no matter how often they claim doing so will make things "simpler" after your death. And talk to your kids about the finances. Funerals are not fun. Fancy flowers cannot change that. Nobody who cares will remember them.
diogenescynic 11y ago
My grandpa pre-paid for his cremation through the Neptune Society.
rpgmaker 11y ago
> You can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated. Even if your next of kin disagree and want a traditional burial for your body? People can be assholes and disregard your final wishes if they think their upholding some kind of tradition/religious principle.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
nommm-nommm 11y ago
My great grandma died at 94. She prepaid her entire funeral, bought the plot, picked out the dress she was to be buried in, and prepaid for everyone to eat afterwards (not sure how that part worked out but she did).

jjoe 11y ago

I understand that the choice/decision to cremate the self is personal. But I think it stops where the personal starts affecting us all. Is cremation that negligible of an issue for the environment?

gambiting 11y ago
Burying in a coffin requires wood and precious land space. What else do you propose? Burial at sea? A boat that would take your body there would also burn oil. I mean, there's a million more wasteful things that you can complain about, other than how we dispose of our bodies after death.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  Why not just liquify bodies with chemicals and then flush them down the drain?
  - outworlder 11y ago
    Down the drain? As in, the city's waste treatment plant? I for one don't want to drink liquefied brains.
    - smileysteve 11y ago
      ... Where do you think fish biodegrade to? Eventually bodies make it to the ground, which then eventually make it to the air...
      - kweinber 11y ago
        "Where do you think fish biodegrade to?" Soylent 1.5, that was just before they switched to algal oil. I wonder what Soylent 3.0 will be made of?
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Is that worse than drinking liquefied shit? Because that's also going into the waste treatment plant, and in far larger quantities than even large-scale corpse disposal would produce. Every molecule of H20 you've every drunk has been part of a disgusting biological process at some point. But homeopathy isn't real; the water doesn't remember.

dankohn1 11y ago

I comparison shopped for my grandmother's cremation a decade ago. I think she would have appreciated the effort. She had already purchased a cemetery slot, so the only question was how to transport her ashes there. The low bidder sent a hearse about 100 miles to get her body, and was easy to deal with on the phone (and took credit cards).

mixmastamyk 11y ago
Why is a hearse needed to transport (presumably an urn of) ashes?
- dankohn1 11y ago
  Hearse to transport the body to the crematorium. The ashes were put in a styrofoam box.
  - CWuestefeld 11y ago
    My parents are part owners of a funeral home. The hearse is only ceremonial, e.g., for bringing a casket from the funeral ceremony to the cemetery. At least in their locale, most funeral homes do not even own their own hearse, but rent one as needed. For picking up bodies, like from the hospital or whatever, they've got a regular van.

stcredzero 11y ago

Even more troubling, in the Internet age, funeral parlors tend to make pricing hard to find. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission allows funeral homes to keep their rates hidden until someone actually writes or calls a funeral home representative -- leaning on regulations last updated in 1994 -- rather than pushing funeral homes to let the customer compare online. How about a company where you can subscribe to get such prices? The company runs something like a call center where software gives employees assignments to periodically inquire about prices, which are then posted to the database? This would cover prices for more than just cremations, of course.

dsp1234 11y ago
FTA: "This post is adapted from the blog of Parting, a Priceonomics customer." From http://www.parting.com http://www.parting.com: "Find trusted funeral homes near you to compare quality and prices"
- shostack 11y ago
  This should really be higher. The entire post is a content marketing/native advertising placement. But that's the only new publisher business model that seems to work these days.
lawpoop 11y ago
There is the Funerals Consumer Alliance. https://www.funerals.org/ https://www.funerals.org/ I think the chapters are all locally run. I went to a local meeting when my mom had terminal cancer. They had a list of local funeral homes with guaranteed prices, and had some agreement with FCA to honor the prices.

cglace 11y ago

Years back, there was a cremation place in Georgia that had its cremation machine break. It was too expensive to fix so the guy just kept accepting bodies. He would drive them to his property and just dump them. It was a pretty huge case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory

rpgmaker 11y ago
"Between 1996 and the date of the discovery, more than 2,000 bodies had been sent to Tri-State. The search ultimately recovered 339 uncremated bodies. Of the 339 bodies that were discovered, 226 were identified." How long did they expect to keep that up? I could conceive of them doing it for maybe a year and then buying a machine but it seems that, at least to them, it became business as usual.
- LordKano 11y ago
  I remember when this was a breaking story. At first, they claimed that some bodies had been improperly stored as they were awaiting repairs to the retort. Then, when the scope of the issue became known, I wondered the same thing. How long did they think they could keep stacking bodies without anyone noticing them? I don't believe they ever thought that far ahead.
  - kweinber 11y ago
    I saw a presentation on it done by one of the officials who did the cleanup (he was actually the same guy in charge of body recovery in Kosovo death camps, brought in because Tristate was so grisly) . He explained that the guy who ran the place was slow (mentally handicapped) ... He came from a good family, who ran the facility responsibly until the father died and he took over. . He wasn't a creep or a cheat, just was not mentally equipped to handle the responsibility.
    - rpgmaker 11y ago
      Wow, thanks for the background on that. He must've been way more handicapped than anyone thought though.

ergothus 11y ago

Somewhat topical story: A co-worker was part of a jogging group (this was in Virginia, USA), and one of their members died after a fight with cancer. He wanted his ashes to be spread in the Botanical Gardens, where they ran. But said Botanical Gardens had rules denying this (don't recall if it was hygiene, environmental, or just not wanting to open the door to piles of ash). So the group somberly gathered, took his ashes, divvied them up among a collection of plastic bags, poked some holes, and went for their normal jog around the park. At the end the bags had only bits of bone too big to fit through the holes left. (Turns out cremation doesn't result in ONLY ash). I haven't decided if this was a triumph of individual respect over bureaucracy, or a blatant disregard for the commons.

refurb 11y ago
Turns out cremation doesn't result in ONLY ash You actually end up with large, intact bones after cremation. They actually take the bones and grind them up into finer particles. I've never seen cremation, ashes, but I've been told they look similar to gravel.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  The process as I understand it: (1) Prep the body by cutting out anything that will harm the cremator, specifically pacemakers with potentially explosive batteries. (2) Fire. (3) Sift through the ashes/bones for any metal (hips/metal screws) (4) Macerate remaining bits into homogeneous ash.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    My dad left his artifical knees to his children when he died. My sisters didn't want them, so I got them. They're mildly interesting. They're great if you have someone who fiddles around with stuff on your desk and doesn't stop when asked. "What's this?" "My dead dad's knee. That dust? That's my dead dad."
- stevesearer 11y ago
  They do look similar to gravel/sand. And something that was surprising to me (although probably shouldn't have been) is that the weight of the remains definitely differs depending on the size of the person.

threefour 11y ago

If you're interested in learning more, this is a great book on the entire process and industry, a rare critical view from inside: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-your-eyes http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-yo...

MonadQueen 11y ago

One problem that can cause price differences is obesity. 2/3rs of Americans are overweight or obese, and it is much more difficult, expensive, and potentially dangerous, to cremate a person who has a bodyfat percentage of 40% or more. See http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/520833/Cremation-obese-57-stone-funeral-home-fire http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/520833/Cremation-obese-5... Funeral Homes should only have to post rates for people with body fat percentages of 25 and below. And they should be allowed to charge more for the fat. Otherwise families of people who were not obese would be subsidizing obese lifestyle choices.

woebtz 11y ago

Semi-related, it's hard to imagine being defrauded out of cremation remains, but it's apparently quite likely to happen during pet cremations (due to the cost to run the machines, multiple smaller pets are processed at the same time and you won't necessarily get back what you sent). This Freakonomics episode goes into more detail: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of-stevie-the-cat-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of...

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> And the lower range cremation prices are likely to attract additional business. They are loss leaders. "If it's under $1000, they're probably losing money. You really don't make much profit on the direct cremation alone," Jung says. "They're just trying to get you into the door." How on earth can incinerating a human body require $1000 worth of consumables, even factoring in the pay for the operator and other employees?

rattray 11y ago

If anyone is interested in working on this, I am connected with an "industry veteran" (has owned dozens of funeral homes and similar institutions across the country) working on an "Uber of cremations". My email is in my profile.

newman314 11y ago
This seems strange. While I think price transparency is good, I'm not quite sure what incentive a funeral home would have in participating since essentially it would be a race to zero.

jack9 11y ago

> People have been buried in coffins for centuries, so why the rise in cremations? > The Cremation Association took a look at this question Why would anyone need to "take a look". We don't have room for all the bodies and internment has (always?) been more expensive than cremation.

dschiptsov 11y ago

Look at traditional Hindu communities - they have all the answers.)