The video addresses the concept of DIY funerals, emphasizing that it does not require taking on every responsibility personally. Instead, Andrew advises that families should focus on tasks that are empowering rather than those that are emotionally or practically difficult.

Key points regarding the approach to DIY funerals include:

*Cost Considerations:** DIY projects are not always more cost-effective. For example, building a casket can be more expensive than purchasing a simple one from a funeral home. Similarly, printing service brochures independently can sometimes cost more than utilizing the funeral home’s in-house, low-cost services.

*Empowerment and Therapeutic Value:
** DIY tasks can be beneficial and therapeutic when they align with a family member’s skills or interests, such as a builder constructing a casket or a family member creating a photo slideshow.

*Collaboration with Funeral Directors:
** Families are encouraged to discuss their plans with a funeral director, who can provide guidance on appropriate tasks. Collaboration allows families to handle certain administrative or creative duties—potentially saving on fees—while leaving more burdensome or stressful tasks to the professionals.

*Balancing Effort and Stress:
** The overarching advice is to choose tasks that provide an emotional boost rather than causing additional stress during a difficult time.

For those interested in exploring DIY options, the video recommends checking the resources or the DIY tab on the Kapiti Coast Funeral Home website.

VIDEO

DiY Funerals Final

When people hear the term DIY funerals they often think it’s about doing absolutely everything themselves and they can feel guilty when they can’t do everything. My advice as a funeral director is yes do the things that empower you yourself but the things that you find difficult particularly emotionally as well as obviously practically don’t feel you have to do them. There are ways of saving money that can outstrip the need to do things that are difficult for you.

For instance, let me give us some examples. You might think we’ll make the casket ourselves. Buying the materials and putting together might cost you seven, eight, nine hundred dollars but you could buy a very simple casket from us for $799 including GST.

So sometimes the doing it yourself is not a money-saving exercise. Contrary to that of course if you’re a builder or a joiner doing it yourself is very therapeutic so don’t think this is all about cost. Often DIY is about empowering you to do stuff.

Stuff like if you love photographs and you want to put together the photo show yourself, there’s a lot of time involved in that and that can be something that’s really beneficial particularly when family members get together. So if you want to do that that can save us doing it. If you’re just giving us all the photos there’s obviously time and professional fee involved with the funeral director.

Lots of ways of empowering you, lots of ways of doing it yourself. Another example would be putting together the service brochure. There’s a lot of to and fro with the funeral home and the family as we put together the order, change photos, change colours, change fonts.

If a family want to do that themselves, if they have the ability, it can save them a lot of time. But talk with the funeral director, talk with the funeral home as well. I recently had a family who said no we’ll do it ourselves, which they did, and then they went off and got it printed at a local printer and it cost them twice what we could do it for.

We do a lot of those in-house printing for instance and we do it at cost or very little over cost. So it can actually be cheaper to use the funeral home than outsourcing. But do your homework, talk to the funeral director, he’ll advise you, she will advise you as to what’s the right things to do to empower you.

So making a choice to DIY, I think it’s a great choice if you’re choosing the things that you are good at and that will give you that emotional boost to say I did this. But for instance if you’re not an admin person, why try and do all the paperwork? Why chase up the medical referee and the doctor and register the death and all those things that take a lot of time if that’s not your thing. But if they are your thing, then get the funeral director to help you do them and we don’t need to charge for that admin if you’re doing it yourself.

So DIY funerals can save you money but make sure it’s not causing you more stress. Talk with the funeral director, work in with them particularly at Kapiti Coast Funeral Home we have a scaling system where it can make it affordable for you. If you want to know more, call us on 04 2985168