As your mourners assemble at the churchyard to say their final farewells, you want them to be thinking of you fondly – don’t you? The last thing you need is them cursing under their breath because they’ve forked out for the funeral or arguing about how to split your art collection because you failed to include it in your will.
But it seems the vast majority of us are making life troublesome for our family and friends at the time of our departure. Only a quarter of the population has bothered to speak to their nearest and dearest about what they actually want from their funeral. Burial or cremation? A bamboo coffin or in the shape of a favourite surfboard? Limo or horse-drawn carriage?
Even more importantly (after all, you’ll be dead so you’re unlikely to care about the details), 41 per cent of us fail to make any financial provision for our send off.
And the lack of this particular form of financial planning leaves one in six families in financial difficulty when covering the cost of even a basic service, which stood at an average of £3,693 in 2015, according to research from the insurance and pensions company SunLife to mark this week’s Dying Matters Awareness Week.
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