Two of New Zealand’s favourite sons strut the television stage most nights extolling the virtues of taking out an insurance cover for your funeral. With the ageing demographic of the country I suppose it makes good sense. Gary McCormack represents AA Life and says if you take out their cover you’ll get twenty cents per litre off your fuel bill every month for a year and Keith Quinn reckons “a Cigna funeral plan allows you to celebrate the things that really matter” though I don’t think things would have mattered much after you were dead.
Given the propensity for so many of our cherished institutions to die themselves over time it might be a bit risky for say a twenty-year-old to take out funeral insurance cover with these two companies in case when you eventually popped your clogs Cigna and AA Life had ceased to exist.
But we learnt recently that grieving Waikanae pensioner Ken Allen hadn’t heeded Mr McCormack’s or Mr Quinn’s advice and was seriously out of pocket when his 81 year old wife Rona died in November.
The couple’s only asset was $8617 in a joint account and Mr Allen chose a modest version for her funeral which cost $7367. This included the casket, service at the cemetery and a burial plot. He paid Kapiti Coast Funeral Homes $5396 up front and applied to Work and Income for a funeral grant to cover the rest. His application was declined on the ground that his savings were well above the asset limit for the grant.
As of April the 1st last year the grant was only available to those with savings below $1720. It’s probably no coincidence that it was about April last year when Mr McCormack and Mr Quinn started invading our living rooms with their genial hype.
In a strange defence Kapiti Coast Funeral Homes said the average cost of their funerals was around $9000 to $10,000.
I have had some involvement in three funerals recently; one cost $5000 another $7500 and the third $11,000. All three involved cremations and I’m curious to know why the discrepancy. Not all the blame lies with the funeral directors who will tell you that their charges only represent about 40% of the total cost.
Burials are more expensive with the local councils making a small fortune on land they own and would have paid for decades ago.
For instance the Masterton District Council charge $1931 for a funeral plot; this includes digging the hole and filling it in afterwards. That means a casket-size area of ground in Masterton’s least expensive suburb is charged out at about $1200. Not a bad return on land bounding a rubbish dump.
It tends to make Donald Trump look like a novice.
Carterton District Council charge $1000 for the plot and $665 for the internment. At least the rising dead there get to overlook a golf course.
Some of the extra costs for funerals these days have come about by families preferring a funeral home service rather than one in a church. In the good old days, when most people had some religious affiliation, services were almost always held in churches which allowed for unpretentious outcomes. A modest offering to the minister and the organist and the church itself was not charged for, although a donation might be given.
It’s no surprise then that the $5000 funeral was held in a Catholic church in Taupo.
Masterton now boasts three splendid funeral homes and the directors will justifiably require a return on their investments.
The equally splendid churches remain tantalisingly empty.
Trying to avoid my own funeral and its attendant cost I have decided to eat more judiciously. In the weight-gain field sugar has suddenly emerged as public enemy number one. Chocolate has all but disappeared from our pantry and when we heard that breakfast cereals are chock full of sugar we decided to take stock.
There was one brand of muesli we were reliably told that had only the tiniest amount of the demon sweetener. It was called Vogel’s All Good. A quick search on the supermarket shelves and we found the potentially heavenly food which proudly announced on the packet: only 7% sugar. The product looked good through a cellophane peephole on the bottom half of the box and we hastily purchased it imagining svelte bodies in the not too distant future.
We were amazed when we opened it to find the packet inside was only half the size of the box outside. What looked like a one kilo box only had a 500gram packet within. Perhaps the answer to weight loss in this instance is that you can only eat the tiniest amount to remain solvent.
So I’ve decided my best option is to book the church and pay the minister, the organist and the District Council in instalments. The trouble is they’ll all want to know an exact date.
Someone asked me recently, “Have you lived in Masterton all your life?
I said, “Not yet.”
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