Two funeral arranging tips for people on a budget

Here are some funeral arranging tips you might find useful if you have a modest funeral budget.

Don't skip the flowers

After the funeral home director provides you with a list of the standard expenses associated with the funeral you're arranging and you see how much the funeral flowers are likely to cost, you might be tempted to skip them entirely, on the basis that, unlike the casket or the hearse, they are not essential.

However, unless your budget is extremely small, it's best not to do this, but to instead look for ways to lower the cost of this particular aspect of the funeral arrangements. Both you and the other funeral guests are likely to notice the absence of these flowers during the funeral service. Flowers can be a poignant visual way for you to honour the person who has died by, for example, adding a colourful spray to their casket or by decorating the altar with wreaths whose colours or shapes relate to some aspect of the deceased's personality. Without them, the room where you have the service might look bare, empty and lacking in warmth.

As such, it's worth finding a way to afford funeral flowers. You could do this by opting for less expensive varieties, such as carnations and daisies, or by having just a few expensive flower varieties, like peonies, and filling in any gaps with some greenery from your own garden.

Assess your priorities

When you have a small budget, you must decide what your priorities are before the funeral arranging begins. This will ensure that you don't overspend on some parts of the funeral, and you can prioritize the most important parts.

For example, if you and your loved ones will be visiting the grave regularly, you might decide to prioritise buying a beautiful headstone over an expensive casket, as whilst the casket will be buried with the deceased, you'll be visiting and looking at the headstone for years to come.

On other hand, if the funeral service will feature an open casket, you might want the deceased to be housed in a beautiful casket as this will be the last time you will see them. In this instance, you might choose to use a lot of your budget on an expensive casket and then choose a less expensive music option (such as playing hymns on a laptop instead of paying for a choir).