Funeral Director Daily
I’ve watched the growth of direct cremation provider and preneed cremation business Pure Cremation from a start-up to, in my opinion, the most profitable investment in Death Care over the past decade. According to the Sun Life “Cost of Dying Report” in Great Britain, direct cremation has grown from a 2-3% market share in…
One of the positive things of living during the winter months in a Florida golf community is that I get to meet and play golf with lots of new people with greatly differing backgrounds from my own. Just last Friday I got paired up with two new friends — one a retired police…
Last week Death Care supplier Matthews International held their First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call with interested parties including investment company representatives. You can access a full transcript of that Earnings Call courtesy of Seeking Alpha here. As has become our custom at Funeral Director Daily we will publish some excerpts from that transcript…
I subscribe to an investment advisory service called “Seeking Alpha“. I do so because I learned about the markets from my father when I was growing up and I’ve always enjoyed learning about how companies sell their products and build their profits. Knowing how a company operates helps me in making my decision…
For as long as I can remember, those of us who work in Death Care have been un-deservedly percieved by many as part of a strange or dark world. You’re going to see that perception rise again as the new movie “The Mortuary Assistant” will debut in theatres on Friday the 13th of February.…
When it is all said and done, corporate conglomerate Matthews International, with a heavy presence in Death Care, will probably be glad that they have left Fiscal Year 2025 behind and are charging into Fiscal Year 2026. FY2025 found Matthews streamline their company by divesting their SGK unit and, while technically FY2026, the…
I’ve been around the Death Care business my whole life. . . . and one thing I can tell you is that, like other businesses, “things” change. For instance, Death Care clientele used to spend a high percentage of their “Death Care spend” on caskets and other merchandise. That’s not always the case anymore.…
Effective as of yesterday, February 2, 2026, Carriage Services implemented “a series of executive leadership promotions and appointments that reflect the Company’s continued momentum and its deliberate efforts over the past several years to build a durable foundation for sustained growth” according to this January press release from the company. Carlos Quezada, Vice…
In a press release issued earlier in January 2026 out of Batesville, Indiana, ClearPoint Federal Bank & Trust made the following statement: “ClearPoint Federal Bank & Trust, a federally chartered savings bank that has been providing trust and recordkeeping services to the funeral and cemetery industry since 1998, announced today that Community…
According to provisional data released from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in January of this year the overall age-adjusted “Death Rate” in the United States for 2025 was about 722 deaths per 100,000 of population. In the Death Care business we have usually based our historical numbers on a “per 1,000” population number…
