Tuesday, July 19, 2016
You "couldn't afford" that trip to Europe because you had to save up for a box?
Wow, it's more than a little depressing to be treated to a slide show of grinning idiots who seemed thrilled to death (no pun intended) that they've bought insurance so they can be absolutely sure that when grandma and grampa kick off they'll get the solid gold casket and ostentatious party they think they deserve.
Because sure, you could leave that "average" expense of Final Burial ($7500, or $8300, depending on which of these vulture-produced commercials you watch) to your loved ones and just sign up in advance with a hospital which will cremate you for free in exchange for any organs you are willing to donate, or just leave your entire body to science, but wow that gold box nobody will ever see again after the funeral sure looks awesome before they throw dirt on it, and after eighty years or so of toil you kind of had your heart set on a parade lead by a long black car followed by your family legally running red lights.
So to hell with the actual needs of those loved ones. Sure, $7500 would make a great start to a grandkid's college fund, but what's that to you? Long black car. Gold box with velvet lining (because your corpse is really going to appreciate the softness, right?) Don't leave these expenses to those loved ones (because if they have any brains, they'll skip all this showy crap for a private little get-together with sandwiches, liquor, a few tears, and a box of You sitting on a table.) Get this insurance so your family can waste an entire day of their own fleeting lives engaged in a stupid medieval ceremony which just leaves them mildly irritated rather than financially stretched.
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What I really hate is the ads that emphasize the importance of elderly people buying insurance not only to cover their funeral costs, but to pay off their credit-card bills. Yes, ideally, no one should run up charges without being able to pay them off, but the fact of the matter is, if someone dies before paying off their credit cards, their debt dies with them if the person doesn't leave enough of an estate to use some of it to settle the debt. The credit-card company can't force anyone else in the person's family to pay up. Unfortunately, many people don't realize this, and get hounded by phone calls from bill collectors after a loved one dies, trying to guilt them into paying off that person's credit-card accounts when they are not obligated to do so. These vultures are one of the lowest forms of human life. They need to realize that allowing older people to have credit cards and then having some of them die suddenly without leaving enough money to pay off the bills is part of the cost of doing their kind of business, and they need to just write it off.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's nice if you decide you need to make sure you leave something for your loved ones so they don't get plagued by these bottom-feeders, and technically it's right to make plans in advance to leave no unpaid debt, but in all honesty, I can think of better things to lose sleep over than these guys losing a few bucks because some of their cardholders die and they can't collect on the unpaid bills.
That is absolutely the message of all of these insurance ads geared toward snagging the money of the elderly- "you don't want to be a burden on your kids, do you?" It's disgusting and wrong but apparently very effective. I'm glad both my parents want to be cremated and scattered, like my father's parents were (my mother's parents insisted on side-by-side stones in a cemetary in Jersey City- where nobody in the family lives- that my mother has never visited, living in Vermont and all.)
DeleteSo true. Funeral directors get people at their most vulnerable moment and try to persuade them that in order to truly "do right" by the loved one they have lost, they cannot go cheap. They have to pay for the "Cadillac" of funerals to show how much they loved the person. It's a bunch of nonsense.
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