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Two Together: Save £100!
Save £100 when you purchase two funeral plans together. Call us for more details.
Two Together: Save £100!
Save £100 when you purchase two funeral plans together. Call us for more details.
One of the key things that we tend to find reassuring when shopping for anything is impartial expert advice. It cuts through the noise of promotional material and advertising like nothing else. One such impartial expert in money-related matters is Martin Lewis, who offers advice on all kinds of things, from car insurance to credit cards. But does Martin Lewis recommend funeral plans? In this article, we aim to answer that question.
If you’ve found us here, it could mean that you are ready to start your end-of-life planning journey. We at Aura would be pleased to help you on your way: we are the top-rated national ‘Cremation Services’ provider on Trustpilot, and we proudly offer our affordable, compassionate prepaid funeral plans across mainland Great Britain.
Key Takeaways
Martin Lewis is known for being a balanced and forthright consumer champion whose mission is to help us all to make more informed and self-beneficial financial decisions. Here is a summary of his views on prepaid funeral plans.
On Martin Lewis’s information website, Money Saving Expert, he gives an overview of prepaid funeral plans, explaining what they are; how they work; when they might and might not be appropriate for you; and what the alternatives are.
In general, he explains that they are worth it if:
He also advises that they may not be worth it if:
In general, Martin Lewis recommends caution whenever there’s a risk that the consumer could pay in more than they get back, which is something he generally stands against. With some of the larger, national providers of funeral plans, such as Co-op, funeral-plan lengths could stretch as long as 25 years. Naturally, with such a long arrangement, the amount of interest being paid can accrue considerably, which may lead to you paying in more than the funeral is actually worth.
He also recommends avoiding funeral plans which charge fixed monthly instalments until death or your 90th birthday, for the reason that this is not really a funeral plan, but a form of insurance for covering funeral costs. He is “not a fan” of arrangements such as over-50s’ life insurance, not only because they cost you much more than necessary, but your coverage could be completely voided if you were to miss a single payment. Indeed, as he himself puts it, “You wouldn’t buy a lottery ticket if it cost more than the jackpot”.
There are certain key advantages about funeral plans which Martin Lewis exemplifies on his website, such as how they can lock today’s funeral costs for your own funeral in the future, and how they can help your family to avoid a financial burden when you die.
As Lewis points out, one of the key advantages of a funeral plan is that, in paying for one, you are locking in today’s prices. According to SunLife, the average cost of a funeral last year was £4,285, and, over a 21-year period, funeral prices have risen by 134%, where inflation has only risen by 75% over the same period. For this reason, it’s a very valuable benefit, as it means, when buying a funeral plan, you can stop the clock on funeral price rises.
To put it bluntly, if you decide not to buy a funeral plan now, and then you were to die in 10 years time, your family will have to organise and pay for your funeral according to the prices of the future, which, in all likelihood, if current trends continue, will have seen a significant increase. Given how location affects funeral costs, if you live somewhere expensive, like London or Edinburgh, when opting for a national funeral provider that provides one rate regardless of location, you can minimise its impact on your funeral costs.
According to Martin Lewis, funeral plans are at their best when you can pay for everything in one go, i.e., if you already have the cash you need to make the purchase. Paying in instalments over the longer term can become less and less cost-effective for you. With that said, many providers, like Aura, offer the option to pay over 12–24 months at no extra cost. It’s normally only over longer periods, where the plan is purchased via a credit agreement, that interest or admin fees begin to be charged per payment.
As an example, Co-op’s direct cremation plan is available from £1,700 when paying upfront in full, but, the cost of paying over five years starts at £31.14 per month, adding up to a total cost of £1,967.78 — more than £250 more expensive than the original starting price. For that reason, if you can pay all in one go, it would be more cost-effective to do so. With some providers it’s possible to pay over as long as 25 years; naturally, the longer the payment plan, the more interest is paid, and the further away from the starting price you will get. This means that the money you pay overall could add up to a lot more than what is actually needed to cover your funeral costs.
Perhaps the greatest benefit available through a prepaid funeral plan is that, because of the fact it will all have been organised and paid for in advance, your family will not need to stump up for extra costs when the time comes. It’s hard enough at the best of times to deal with grief, but having the added complication of needing to pay for a funeral at short notice can make it a lot worse.
For this reason, it’s really important to set out, ahead of time, your end-of-life wishes. You might want to consider starting a funeral preplanning checklist in order to make this process a bit easier. All of this preparation can go towards making life easier for your family when you’re no longer here.
Despite the positive conclusions that Martin Lewis tends to draw about funeral plans as a way of paying for a funeral, he also highlights some alternative options that could work better for some people, depending on their circumstances. These include receiving help from others, using the estate, or relying on the government.
If there’s enough money in your estate to cover the cost of your funeral, it can be used for that purpose by the executor of your will. They may need to use your will to apply for probate before they will be able to do this, which is one of the things behind the importance of writing a will. With that said, oftentimes, banks will allow the family to access funds in the bank account of someone who has died in order to pay for the funeral after the verification of certain documents, such as their Death Certificate.
Lewis points to various different third-parties from whom support can be secured. For instance, if your family is willing and in a position to pay for your funeral, this may make for a better outcome than paying for things yourself. When it comes time, your family may also find that bereavement support is available to them from the UK government in the shape of the Funeral Expenses Payment, and the Bereavement Support Payment. Both of these payments can help to keep funeral costs down when the time comes, assuming your next of kin is eligible.
From time to time, Martin Lewis does refer to insurance, such as over-50s life insurance, as a means of paying for future funeral costs. However, as noted, he largely recommends avoiding this kind of product. The main reason for this is that, unlike a funeral plan (which has been purposefully designed to pay for your funeral in full), an over-50s life insurance policy may not cover the full costs of your funeral when the time comes. That’s because it pays out a cash lump sum to the beneficiary of the policy, which doesn’t necessarily need to be used to pay for a funeral. There’s also a risk that, if you miss a payment, your policy could be null and void, regardless of how long you’ve been paying for.
There are a number of tips which Martin Lewis offers for helping you to decide on the right funeral plan for you.
Before you sign up, Martin Lewis recommends that you make sure you understand what is included in the price of your plan. There are many different providers out there, each offering similar plans. Some have low starting prices which mask the fact that other elements need to be added in at extra cost. Others have plan structures which include things you don’t necessarily need at a higher price. You might find that some providers only include the collection of the person who has died from certain places at certain times in their price, whereas Aura will collect from anywhere in mainland Great Britain at any time. For that reason, it is very important to compare funeral plans against one another, so that you can get a good sense of which offer aligns most closely with your needs.
Lewis also recommends checking that the provider you are interested in is FCA-authorised. In practice, it would be highly unlikely to find one that isn’t authorised, as this has been an industry requirement since July 2022. But it will just give you that little bit of extra reassurance that funeral plans are safe.
It could be useful to ask some of the following questions of a funeral provider in whom you’re interested:
Can I cancel my plan for free if I change my mind?
As standard, there is usually a 30-day cooling-off period when signing up to a funeral plan, within which the provider will allow you to cancel your plan free of charge and get your money back. However, if you want to cancel after this period, you might find that you will need to pay a cancellation fee which could be quite steep depending on the provider. Co-op’s is currently £125, whereas, in certain circumstances with Golden Charter, you could pay as much as £325 to cancel. With Aura, there is no cancellation fee should you wish to cancel your plan at any time, for any reason.
What happens to my ashes after I have been cremated?
When looking at a direct cremation plan, a question people often have relates to what will happen to their ashes. Of course, there are many different cremation ashes ideas that people have today, from scattering ashes somewhere to having an ash scattering ceremony. For that reason, you should ask the provider you’re interested in what their process is with regards to ashes: some only offer the option to collect ashes from them, or to have them scattered in their own Garden of Remembrance. Aura includes the hand-delivery of your ashes back to your family within one of our durable scatter tubes.
We hope you have found this article useful, and that it has answered the question “does Martin Lewis recommend funeral plans?”. Lewis offers impartial advice on the subject, framing the advantages available through buying a funeral plan against extra considerations you may want to make. It’s a very important decision, and it’s key that you take the time you need to get it right, and to find objective sources of information on the subject.
Aura has a score of 4.9/5 stars on Trustpilot, which helps us to stand out as one of the most compassionate and high-quality funeral plan providers in Great Britain. We are family-run and family-focused, with our founder, Paul Jameson, running the company today alongside his son, David (our CEO) and a family friend called Ben (our COO). Paul founded Aura back in 2019 after his diagnosis with motor neurone disease, and we all work with the same goal now as he had back then: to provide low-cost, high-quality funeral plans to families across Britain. That’s why, in the work we do, we strive to provide a level of quality that Paul would expect for his own family.
If you’d like to see whether Aura could be the right funeral-planning partner for you and your family, why not download our free funeral plan brochure today?
Our brochure includes all the details you need surrounding our prepaid direct cremation funeral plans.
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