4 Burial Life Insurance Alternatives – Podcast Episode 13

In this podcast, I’m going to be discussing four burial life insurance alternatives, let’s get started. The number one burial insurance alternative is prepaid funeral plans, and oh my gosh, they sound so great, right, you go down to the funeral home, and you pay everything off, and then your family doesn’t have to worry about it. Now, that may be true. But here’s the deal. Most people don’t have the money to put it all down at once.

So you got to make payments. So let’s say they wanted $15,000, to make sure that you got buried in everything. And that’s with all the plant and everything flowers and casket and, you know, transportation, all that stuff. So, if you had $15,000, you could go down and pay that transfer that money over to them, they would lock in your coverage. And if you lived another 20 years, and the price went up to 20,000 or 25,000. Or even more, they would end up covering the difference.

Well, how did they do that you might ask? Well, they take your $15,000, and you they just invest it into the stock market or whatever, you know, probably some fairly conservative investments. And they just calculate a rate of return on that and they use your money to offset any future price increases.

Now, I mean, from your standpoint, you’re just you’re locking in really at today’s pricing. So it sounds pretty good, right? But here’s the deal. Most people can’t afford to just transfer 10 or $15,000, over to the funeral home. So they end up having to do payments. So when you’re doing payments, you know, it may take you 10 years or even more possibly, to pay that off.

So let’s let’s think about this, if it was a $15,000 funeral, and you made your first installment payment on that $15,000 And maybe you paid $100 And then you died two or three days later, the funeral home is not going to pay the entire $15,000 plan, you have only put $100 in your basically you are prepaying it.

So they will only cover as much money as you actually have in the policy itself. Which means if you’re buying this to protect your loved ones or your children, they’re not going to apt absolutely be protected. Until, what 10 years from now, however long it takes you to pay it off. So although it all sounds good, in just kind of planning wise, in execution, it often doesn’t work out.

The other thing too is, you know, these plans if you do the payment plan that can often work out, okay, if you’re younger, like if you’re in your 50s or something, maybe early 60s. But you know what we’ve found, and helping 1000s and 1000s of people, there’s so many, so many people are so busy living, they don’t think about dying.

And they don’t think about getting this insurance until it’s too late. And then they’re on a fixed or limited income. And they find themselves in their 60s and 70s and 80s. And they haven’t done anything about this. And those pre paid plans can just be so awfully expensive. Plus, they just expose your loved ones and families to a lot of risk that, you know, if you hadn’t paid it off yet, they’re going to have to come with money out of pocket.

So in that case, final expense, life insurance, burial insurance, cremation insurance, what we help families with with funeral funds, is often the better choice for a number of reasons. Number 190 to 95% of the time we’re getting people approved for first day coverage or benefits. So that means hypothetically with first day coverage, if your policy were issued and approved and went into force today and you died tomorrow, the insurance company would pay out the coverage amount.

So let’s say it’s 15,000 You got approved for $15,000 policy, you paid $50 for that first month, and you died a day later the insurance companies would have to pay that $15,000 out right. Good for your family bad for the insurance company. That’s just how it works out. So yeah, first day coverage is just really provides a lot of peace of mind to folks and often it’s going to be significantly cheaper than making payments on a compressed payment plan on a prepaid funeral wrong. So, you know, even though the prepaid plan is an alternative, in most cases, people we talked to are genuinely better going off going and getting final expense life insurance.

The number two burial insurance, life insurance alternative is savings accounts. This is kind of got some of the same flaws as the prepaid plan, and that most people aren’t good savers. So having a savings account that you don’t save money into, is not really an ideal situation.

And the other thing, too, is a lot of times if there’s money in the savings account, people just have a tendency to spend that money, they find stuff to spend on it, to spend it on. And if they don’t find something to spend it on, a lot of times their health as they get older dictates that they spend that money. And then they find themselves at a ripe old age. And they’ve spent all of that and now they don’t have any insurance in place. And certainly prepaid funds. Prepaid funerals get awfully expensive at that point.

So really, it’s that point. Again, if you don’t have to worry about coming up with $10,000, which, that takes a lot of time for folks on a fixed or limited income on Social Security or disability. It can help you with first day coverage, life insurance, whole life insurance, cremation insurance, burial insurance, funeral funds insurance, and take care of that. And that way, you don’t have to worry about it. Most people want one thing, when they’re planning for their their final arrangements, they want peace of mind, they want to know that they’ve got a guaranteed plan in place, that when they pass away, their loved ones, or children aren’t going to have to pay for this. Savings accounts, really not the best way to do that.

The third way is not the best way either, but we’re going to present it to you crowdfunding, like, you know, GoFundMe or something like that. Basically, internet begging, unfortunately, and, you know, there’s, there’s places and times for that, that something tragic happened. And, you know, it’s always good to support people and, you know, in a time of need, be able to kind of provide for and care for and, you know, show some love financially to some people that are struggling.

I’ll say this, though, that a lot of times, you know, I feel that it’s best to use for stuff that it’s like a surprise, kind of out of the blue. But you know, you’re dying, but I both die. And that’s not a surprise, we know we’re gonna die, we’re not guaranteed another day, you know, we hope to make it tomorrow.

But we should be planning to die today, because we just never know. You know, it could be something totally out of our control could be, could be our health, the heart attack could be getting hit by a truck, cement trucker. You know, accidental, you know, some construction worker drops the hammer from 20 stories up and we happen to be where it hits the ground, right?

So yeah, just crowdfunding is a not cool way to go. That’s just poor planning the life that you are very intentional, and that you plan for things. And if you don’t want your your family members or loved ones or children to suffer financially, when you pass away, just take care of that be an adult. And, you know, we can help you at funeral funds.com, we’ll run a bunch of different prices for you, it will help you understand your best options.

Just understand crowdfunding is not a good way to go, you know, crowd under crowdfunding, I would kind of put that like having to fish, fish fry, or bingo or kind of anything like that where, you know, people loved him cared enough enough about you to come together and do that. But I can assure you one thing, people would prefer not to do that. So take care of this yourself. And it’ll be a better legacy to leave behind for all your friends and families as well.

The fourth burial life insurance alternative is government assistance. And one of those sayings that kind of though, the number one thing you don’t want to hear is, hey, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help you. Right. And somebody famous said that once. But yeah, the government just really doesn’t offer any plans at all they do.

The Social Security ministration they do prove do provide a one time benefit of $255 to the surviving spouse, or dependent of child who’s passed away. But in many cases, we’re hearing that for any number of loopholes, people aren’t getting that money and really think about it.

Does $255 really even move the needle if you’ve got a 10 or $15,000? You know, burial $5,000 cremation $2,000 cremation. Yeah, it really doesn’t, doesn’t do much at all. And, you know, unfortunately, not to like make this a political discussion. But, you know, our government can’t even fund itself. We’re over 30 trillion dollars in debt. And, you know, they can’t even budget their own thing much less budget for their constituents to pay for burials.

So it’s just not gonna happen. You’re gonna have to take care of this on your own. And, you know, prepaid funeral plan can work but it’s not ideal as I’ve highlighted savings accounts. Yeah, in a perfect world they work. But when where the rubber meets the road, they don’t work, crowdfunding, that’s just not a cool way to go. And government assistance. Yeah, the government has trouble running itself, much less taking care of your final expense needs.

NOTE: Show notes are AI transcribed, so there may be some spelling or grammatical errors.