DIY Funerals link to video
Andrew discusses what we can do to help you with DIY funerals, what’s possible and what’s not, we just want to help you and save you money
I am Andrew Malcolm, Funeral Director. Every year I do a series of articles about how to save money on funeral costs, and this time my focus is on DIY funerals being all or parts thereof of the funeral process. Many of the corporately owned funeral homes have set fees, which is good business sense for them, but when families often do parts of the funeral themselves they expect to pay less, and sometimes with those big corporates that’s not so.
Kapiti Coast Funeral Home is the only locally owned and non-corporate funeral home on the Kapiti Coast, and one of few in the Wellington area. So along with our competitive set fees, we also have our professional fee calculation, which is a system reflecting the work we do, and just the work we do. So if we do a lot we obviously reflect more fees, if we do a little then we only reflect a small amount of fees.
This helps families knowing that their needs are met, and there’s a balance between when families want to do things themselves and when they can’t always. And when the time runs out and the emotional energy runs out, that’s where Kapiti Coast Funeral Home are happy to do a lot or a little, it’s totally up to the family. We call ourselves the 11th hour specialists because that’s often when we have to kick into things.
A family in my care planned a Saturday morning funeral, and they were going to do everything themselves. Not just leading the service, which you’d expect with DIY, but organising the flowers and the newspaper notices, and all the AV, the photo, trivia, graphic design, service programming, music, etc. We were happy to support them in doing this, but at five o’clock on Friday when I was about to head home, they rang in a panic.
They’d only just finished sorting the photos, let alone scanning them or doing anything with the graphic design work. And the funeral was the next morning. They were flustered.
They were exhausted. They had hit the wall, I suppose you’d say, with nothing left in the tank. And how were they going to complete these tasks? I said, leave it with us, as we do, the 11th hour specialists.
I called in an assistant, and the two of us sat there for many hours, in fact past 10 o’clock at night, working hard to make sure that the service was ready for the following morning. The service sheet was completed, the photos were all scanned, the slideshow, the photo tribute was made, the music was downloaded and embedded. It was all ready to go.
A little or a lot, that’s what we do. That’s why we’re here. So if you’re wanting to do a DIY funeral, talk to us first about how we can help, a lot or a little, as a backstop or just as dovetailing into what the family can handle at the time, not necessarily what they think they can handle.
While all the time a local independent funeral home is here only charging for what we end up doing. So for more information on costs, drop into the funeral home, or pick up a cost brochure, or pop onto our site online, www.covertycoastfuneralhome.co.nz or just come in and have a chat about it. It’s free.
Funeral questions, I’m here to help.
