r/AskIreland • u/eire1228 • 11h ago
Personal Finance Typical funeral costs (all in)?
No plans on dying any time soon but trying to do a little forward planning. What's the typical cost of a funeral and burial? I suspect it varies on region. Do you save a lot of money by being cremated? Does everything have to go through a funeral home? Can you have a non-religious wake and be cremated? Don't want to leave my kids with any financial burden. I thought the credit union used to have insurance for funerals but can't seem to find anything other than a once off payment of 1k.
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u/sillydoomcookie 10h ago
My dad's last year was 5k for funeral home expenses including cremation, 300 for the humanist celebrant and about 2k for the sit down meal after including a drink for everyone. IIRC my mum's was about the same 5 years ago. We want to get a columbarium space for their ashes which I think is going to be about 1.5k.
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u/eire1228 10h ago
yes, thinking about a columbarium space. there's one in Killarney now apparently.
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u/An_Boin_De 10h ago
What's the typical cost of a funeral and burial?
€6-€10k for a decent funeral. I'd budget 8-10k depending on where you live. Especially given inflation.
A cremation can be as low as €1k with no ceremony, wake or anything. They just take you from hospital to crematorium and do the job.
Do you save a lot of money by being cremated?
Not really because you still want a wake, some sort of ceremony and a funeral home attendants have to drive and hour or two from your town to the crematorium..you also want a nice coffin for the wake as well as flowers, funeral directors.etc. A cemetery plot isn't that expensive, maybe €1500 for the plot plus €1k for digging the grave etc but headstones are expensive, can be 5k.
https://www.westmeathcoco.ie/en/ourservices/environment/burialgrounds/fees/
Does everything have to go through a funeral home?
Yes, pretty much. You can chose which funeral home suits you best. No one else is equipped to handle a body and they also have all the contacts and make everything extremely smooth and seamless for the grieving family. They contact the hospital to arrange collection, they arrange the priest or whoever, flowers, graveyard, crematorium and the music, they plan all the timing for everything as well. They are actually quietly brilliant and their jobs. It sounds mad but timing for funerals is really important.
Can you have a non-religious wake and be cremated?
Yes, very common now. Around me lots of people are waked at home without prayers or a maybe a very short rosary done by the family. Then tea and biscuits and cakes and lots of visitors coming and going for a couple of days before being brought in the hearse from home to the crematorium. At the crematorium some people chose to speak and a couple of nice songs were played and even a slide show of nice photos (very tasteful)
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u/PhilTwhole 7h ago
There was a woman on one of the Irish subs last year. Her uncles body was collected from the home, cremated and ashes returned in a cardboard box. 3k. I think it was Dublin 12
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u/Marzipan_civil 10h ago
Do you have a plot you can use for burial, or would you have to buy one? In Cork they have to be bought from the council (who run all the cemeteries), cost of about a thousand euro - which is possibly one reason why cremation works out cheaper.
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u/eire1228 10h ago
no plot. suppose I should look into it if they can be purchased in advance?
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u/JacksonLambsSocks 10h ago
A lot of places don’t allow purchase in advance anymore. Our local which has relatives in there of several generations stopped selling plots years ago.
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u/SavingsDraw8716 8h ago
€6k to €10k. Less if you have a smaller, basic wake in funeral home, plot already and get something back from Credit Union. That figure includes headstone engraving as well but not a new headstone or serious grave rehabilation work.
Biggest thing you can do is get your childrens name on a bank account and have them know passwords, codes etc so they can use those funds straight away.
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u/Effective-Review-780 10h ago
My mams was about 6.5k 4 years ago. You can pick a funeral director and put money aside for it, if thats something you'd want to do.
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u/infinitylemons 9h ago
€5K earlier this year. Burial, coffin, funeral director, hearse, musician at church, etc. Could probably have done it cheaper but local funeral director dealt with everything.
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u/FreckledHomewrecker 8h ago
Recently for a relative who planned her own celebration of life and intentionally kept it as cheap as possible was just over 5k for a funeral director, a single hearse, humanist ceremony, basic coffin and cremation. It was beautiful and I don’t think you’d have noticed anything ‘cheap’ about it because it felt very personal and bespoke to the kind of person she was but it was definitely as low as the costs could go. The afters was a separate fee that others arranged and paid for as a gift to her family.
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u/DesperateEscape3419 10h ago
My nanny’s 2 years ago with cremation but already having a plot was around €8k
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u/ou812_X 10h ago
€8.5k recently with cremation. That was quite a basic funeral with one mourning car. Doesn’t include cash tips on the day which probably added another couple of hundred but did include the “afters” which was €1,200 on its own there were a couple of rounds of drinks and decent food included in that.
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u/JacksonLambsSocks 10h ago
A Post do some kind of funeral plan. My mum had started it last year thinking she had loads of time (wasn’t terminally ill). Passed suddenly a few months later and they refunded us what little she had paid. Funeral which was a cremation cost close to €8,000 we didn’t do anything fancy or have extra cars or anything like that also that cost didn’t incl food. Basically just the funeral home bill who looked after the crematorium
You still have to buy a coffin which cost over €1000. And an urn which we still haven’t done due to indecision, they’re stupid expensive.
If you plan on being cremated make sure you tell your loved ones what you want done with your ashes. Mum always said cremation but no clue about ashes.
I remember seeing a brochure in the funeral home too at the time about some kind of pre payment thing for a funeral.
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u/amuletdrop 9h ago
The coffin was only €1000? My aunt bought the cheapest coffin for her husband and it was €4k!
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u/JacksonLambsSocks 3h ago
Think it was 1500 possibly. There was a wicker one that none of us wanted and I’m pretty sure we got the cheapest wooden one. Not because it was the cheapest but because we wanted something simple and most importantly no religious regalia on it. She’d always said the cheapest cos it doesn’t matter but the wicker looked desperate. It’s an awful racket really when you don’t have much of a choice. Perhaps your poor aunt had even less choice? You feel so stingy and guilty looking at the cheaper ones
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u/Purple-Company8766 9h ago
Cost us 8k in August for a funeral. 6k for the coffin + funeral director, 2k for sit down meal. If you have a credit union account, ask about a Death Benefit Insurance (DBI) or funeral grant. We got 2k from the credit until towards the funeral costs. The remainder was paid through AIB. They allow funds to be released for funeral and testamentary expenses straight from the deceased’s account. All of this was very helpful as it was a sudden death and we hadn’t a financial plan in place for funeral expenses.
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u/Embarrassed_Error_37 10h ago
6.000 3 years ago already had the grave it was 1300 to open it was in the price
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u/OkHall2127 8h ago edited 8h ago
Paid around 10k about 4 years ago for my FIL in Dublin. That included all funeral home expenses, church/priest, singer and pianist, graveyard costs, rip.ie and newspaper notices, full carvery dinner for God knows how many people and a round of drinks for god knows how many people. Then a few years later paid about 1.5k for new gravestone. He'd left all the money for it in fairness
Edited to add that the grave plot itself had previously been purchased.
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u/GrahamR12345 10h ago
If you want it as cheap as possible you could try donate your body to the royal college of surgeons and when they are finished slicing and dicing they give your family the ashes. Get in touch with them, they should have a brochure or guide.
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u/Forward-Depth-845 5h ago
If you're in the credit union I think they pay towards your funeral. Not sure on it look it up.
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u/Dull_Brain2688 5h ago
6-10k. Doesn’t include grave or headstone.
Undertakers are a godsend. Yeah, they charge for it but they’re the professionals and they will help you through a tough time.
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u/Embarrassed-Bet-8857 11h ago
Average of about 6k,
Wakes are not religious usually
https://www.privatecremation.ie/blog/non-religious-and-humanist-funeral-options?srsltid=AU7gw4VTKb1IOWb59rodziEh23hPjG51v_P7rusWqnrVlO5CfPgOF9VB