Funeral and final expense planning
Funeral Planning Checklist
Eight sections of decisions and paperwork, written as a practical to-do list rather than a worst-case story. Fill it in and print it for your family.
Most of what makes this hard for a family is not grief. Grief is not something a checklist helps with. What a checklist helps with is the forty separate decisions that have to be made in about three days, by people who are not in a state to be making them, often without knowing what you would have wanted.
That is the whole purpose of this worksheet. Write down the decisions once, while it is an ordinary afternoon, and your family gets to spend that week being your family instead of being administrators.
Eight sections, and you can fill in as much or as little as you like. There is no signup and nothing is saved. Fill it in on screen and print it, or print it blank and use a pen.
These tools are educational. They are built to help you ask better questions, and they do not replace a personal review with Anthony.
Fill in the worksheet
Work through as much as you like, in any order. The write-in fields are there so the printed copy carries your actual answers rather than just checkmarks.
0 of 58 handled(0%)
Where your plan stands
Nothing checked off yet. You do not have to do this in one sitting, and section 1 alone is worth more than the rest combined: writing down what you actually want removes the decisions your family would otherwise be making by guesswork.
Sections with something still open
- 1. Preferred final arrangements
- 2. Key contacts
- 3. Documents
- 4. Funeral home preferences
- 5. Burial or cremation details
- 6. Final bills and obligations
- 7. Family communication
- 8. Questions for Anthony
Suggested next steps
- 1Print this worksheet once you have filled in what you can. A written copy your family can find is worth more than a complete plan only you know about.
- 2Call one funeral home and ask for their itemized price list. It is free, you are not committing to anything, and it turns section 4 from guesswork into figures.
- 3If the person you are planning for is a veteran, check VA burial benefits before pricing anything else.
- 4Use the Funeral Cost Planning Calculator on this site with the prices you gathered, to see the total and any gap.
- 5Tell one person that this plan exists and where it is kept. That is the step most often missed.
- 6Bring the funding question, and anything still unanswered, to a conversation with Anthony.
Nothing you type into this worksheet is saved or sent anywhere. It stays in your browser until you close the page, so print it or write it down if you want to keep it.
The three items that matter most
If you only do part of this, do these three. They account for most of the difficulty a family runs into, and none of them cost anything.
- Write down what you actually want, in section 1. Not a general sentiment: the specific choices. Burial or cremation, a service or not, where. Families can handle carrying out a plan. What they struggle with is deciding on your behalf and then wondering for years whether they got it right.
- Put the documents in one place and tell one person where, in section 3. Discharge papers, policy numbers, and account lists are all findable eventually. Eventually is the problem, because several of the decisions have a deadline of about seventy-two hours.
- Answer the money question honestly, in section 6. Not what exists on paper, but what could be reached in the first week. Accounts get frozen, estates take months, and funeral homes generally ask for payment up front.
Where the money usually comes from, and how fast
This is the section families are least prepared for, and it is worth being specific rather than reassuring about it.
Funeral homes generally expect payment at the time of arrangement, not after an estate settles. Bank accounts in the deceased person's sole name can be frozen. Probate takes months. The Social Security lump-sum death payment exists but is small relative to funeral costs. A veterans burial allowance, where it applies, is usually reimbursed after the fact rather than paid upfront.
What tends to actually work in the first week: money in a jointly held or payable-on-death account, a prepaid arrangement already in place, or a life insurance death benefit paid to a named beneficiary, which bypasses probate and typically pays out in a matter of days or weeks once a claim and a death certificate are submitted.
A final expense policy is one way people cover this. The money goes to the beneficiary you name rather than to a funeral home, and it is not restricted to funeral costs: it can go toward medical bills, household expenses, or anything else. Whether it makes sense for you depends on your situation, and it is a conversation rather than a product to pick off a page. No premiums or payout figures appear anywhere on this site.
Common questions
- What should a funeral planning checklist include?
- Four things at minimum: your preferences for the arrangements themselves, who should be contacted and who should coordinate, where the documents are, and how the costs would be paid. The first three are free to sort out and take an afternoon. The fourth is the one families most often leave unresolved, and it is the one that shows up first.
- Is this available as a PDF I can download?
- Use the print button at the top of the checklist. It produces a clean printable version, including anything you typed in, which you can print on paper or save as a PDF using your browser's print dialog. There is no email form and no download gate.
- Do I need a lawyer for this?
- Not for this worksheet, which records preferences and gathers information. You do want an attorney for the legal documents it refers to: a will, a durable power of attorney, and a healthcare directive. Those are separate instruments with legal effect, and a funeral preferences worksheet does not substitute for any of them.
- Is a written funeral plan legally binding on my family?
- Generally it records your wishes rather than compelling anyone. How much legal weight a written funeral directive carries, and who has the legal right to make final arrangements, varies and is governed by state law. If it matters to you that a specific wish be followed or a specific person be in charge, that is worth raising with an attorney rather than relying on a worksheet.
- How much does a funeral cost?
- It varies widely by location, provider, and what you choose, so a single figure is not much use for planning. The reliable approach is to ask two or three funeral homes for their itemized price list, which they are required to give you, and to ask the cemetery separately about its own charges. The Funeral Cost Planning Calculator on this site will total those figures and show the gap against whatever is set aside.
- Should I prepay for a funeral?
- It is one option among several, with tradeoffs worth understanding before committing: whether the arrangement moves with you if you relocate, what happens if the funeral home changes ownership or closes, which specific prices are locked and which are not, and what happens to the money in the meantime. Ask for the answers in writing, and compare them against other ways of setting the money aside.
- Is anything I type into this worksheet saved?
- No. Everything stays in your browser's memory and is discarded when you close or reload the page. Nothing is transmitted and nobody receives it. That is deliberate, given what this worksheet asks for. If you want a copy, print it.
Sources
Primary sources for the rights, benefits, and prices this worksheet refers to.
- Federal Trade Commission: shopping for funeral services
Your rights under the Funeral Rule, including the right to an itemized price list and to buy individual items rather than a package.
- Federal Trade Commission: funeral costs and pricing checklist
A category-by-category list you can take with you when you call funeral homes.
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: burial benefits and memorial items
Eligibility for a national cemetery plot, a headstone or marker, and burial allowances. Requires discharge papers, which is why section 3 lists them.
- Social Security Administration: survivors benefits
Includes the one-time lump-sum death payment available to certain surviving spouses and children, and what happens to a benefit when someone dies.
- National Funeral Directors Association: cost of a funeral
NFDA's periodic study of median funeral costs, for national context alongside the local prices you gather.
Important disclosures
- This tool is provided for general education and planning discussion only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or keep any product.
- The results depend entirely on the numbers and assumptions you enter. Change an assumption and the answer changes. Nothing here is a projection of what will happen, a quote, or a guarantee.
- No product prices, premiums, interest rates, or payout amounts are quoted anywhere on this page. Any figures specific to a product would come from the issuing company in writing, after a personal review.
- This worksheet records preferences and gathers information. It is not a legal document, and it does not substitute for a will, a power of attorney, a healthcare directive, or a funeral directive prepared with an attorney.
- Whether a written statement of funeral wishes is binding, and who holds the legal right to make final arrangements, is governed by state law. Consult an attorney if it matters that a specific wish be enforceable.
- Nothing you enter is saved, transmitted, or received by anyone. It stays in your browser until you close the page.
- Anthony D. Morrison is an independent financial professional licensed in Florida. For advice about your own situation, including tax questions, talk with Anthony and with your own tax professional.
Talk it through with Anthony
Once you know roughly what you want covered, the next question is how to fund it. Anthony will walk through the options with you directly, explain what a policy would and would not do, and answer questions without a sales pitch. There is no cost to ask.
Prefer the phone? 407-942-7689
Keep going
Practical planning for the costs a family faces after a death, and for the paperwork and decisions that are easier to sort out ahead of time.