Preneed
Our funeral home will celebrate 150 years of service in 2022. However, we have really only helped families pre-arrange and pre-finance funerals since about 1964 — about 60 years. And, in those early years, it really wasn’t about pre-planning and pre-financing consumer funerals, but about setting up payment options or trusts for those helped through…
An article entitled “Relational Spending in Funerals: Caring for others loved and lost” appeared in the March edition of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. The research for the article was done by assistant marketing Professor Sarah Whitley of the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. In this article about the study you can read…
I’m a fan of Warren Buffett and his company, Berkshire Hathaway. Matter of fact, I enjoy reading his annual shareholder letter because it just doesn’t tell how his businesses are doing, it explains to the reader why he is in those businesses and how he makes money for his shareholders. Back in 1936 a gentleman…
Life insurance rates, at least for the time being, are holding stable regardless of the excess deaths due to Covid-19 in 2020. A recent press release from Policygenius, that you can access here, says that “The May index shows life insurance pricing stability, despite an increase in the U.S. death rate evident in data recently…
As many times happens with me, I learn something from a news item or items and then try to convert that knowledge to the funeral industry and try to figure out if or how what I’ve learned will translate to our profession. So was the case this week when I saw some public relations for…
A big part of our mission at Funeral Director Daily is to look around the death care industry and report what we see happening in the profession back to our fellow funeral directors. Our thought is that those fellow funeral directors were much like I was in my 35 year front-line funeral service career —…
Only about a week ago Funeral Director Daily brought to our readers some new promotional spots by direct cremation start-up Solace. We told you that we liked them and then linked them for you to view. You can see that article here. We also told you in that article that we have been big fans…
Toronto based cremation provider Eirene announced last week in this announcement that they would be teaming up with Assurant Life of Canada (ALOC), an affiliate of Assurant Inc., to allow for Canadians to be able to pre-pay for cremations online as part of their estate planning. Eirene bills itself, on their website as, “High quality,…
CUNA Mutual Group announced last week in this press release that it intends to acquire the preneed funeral business of global conglomerate Assurant. We told you late last year, in this article, that Assurant was expected to move on from the preneed business as it concentrated on other business elements. The reported purchase price by…
This article picks up on yesterday’s discussion of what could happen as more crematories are built expanding the supply of crematories in the United States. Yesterday’s discussion then went to the thought process and question of, “Will this excess capacity in cremation move cremation to a lower and lower retail cost as death care companies…
