$10 000 by time your done. Don't sighn your name to anything, you might be paying.
@iamthehub, I agree with
@Milkman that funeral homes are deeply crooked, but there's NO WAY that your family should have to pay $10K unless they want to.
First decision is, cremate or bury whole - the latter shoots the costs WAY up. Next decision, cremate before service or have a showing and then cremate after - again the latter shoots the costs up a lot.
Like a lot of people, we've opted for simple and inexpensive and haven't felt that either the dead or any of the living were cheaped-out. The body has gone from the hospital to the crematorium, we received an urn, had a memorial service in a church or a hall or our home, and we spread the ashes somewhere significant (or in a couple of cases interred them in an already-owned family plot). It's been a few years since I planned one myself, but all of this cost only a few thousand, well under half the cost
@Distortion poses above.
Start with the funeral home, go in with an idea of what you want and with questions. Let them know that you'll be visiting other funeral homes, especially if you don't like what you hear.
As someone else has already said above, don't let them prey on your family. They're scum. Good friend of mine spent more than a year getting the education (after decades doing something else) and interning at one of Toronto's top funeral homes. He barely made it through the internship and quit when they offered him a full-time job; detested the many scummy dishonest parts of the business. Don't let them use the tactics on you.
Young man, sudden death... was it suicide? Just went through that earlier this year with our daughter's "cousin" by marriage, a fine young man who'd had Christmas dinner with us just months before he killed himself; shock to us all. I didn't plan this funeral, but the people who did were wise. The memorial service was almost two months after the death, so people had lost some of their shock, and weren't feeling rushed to attend a service, lots of notice and time to prepare for it. Many of the more-skilled were asked to speak about him, and by that time maybe didn't feel obligated to express shock and sadness. They remembered the young man with deep fondness and humor that seemed to help many people move through the sadness. The memorial service was a deeply moving and quite-happy event.
Best of luck.
