If you have been lucky enough to not have the duty of planning a funeral lately, you may not be aware how quickly these costs are rising. Average American funeral expenses can easily top $10,000. Besides the expense of a service and burial, many families also need to attend to the duty of settling their loved one’s debts, handling an estate, and cleaning out a home. Very often, guests need to be fed and housed or travel arrangements must be made. Without some prior financial planning, this burden can add considerable stress to a time when families should just be supporting each other in their grief.

For many seniors and their families, the solution is burial insurance. Here at BurialInsuranceQuote.org, we are eager to help. You are welcome to request free and online burial insurance quotes at any time. If you would rather chat in person, feel free to call us.

Do You Need a Burial Policy?

Burial costs have been rising. Consider some statistics about the average price of U.S. funerals, not including a plot, over the last few decades:

• 1960: $708
• 2000: $5180
• 2022: $8,743

Some elderly people or their families can pay for a funeral out of their own pockets, but planning to write a check for about $10,000 is not possible for many. One of the beauties of burial life insurance is that it pays a cash death benefit to the beneficiary. He or she is free to spend this money as needed. While some of the cash may be used to pay for a funeral and associated final expenses, the rest can be saved or spent on anything the beneficiary chooses.

The advantage of this method of planning for funerals is that it offers the person who will be responsible for final arrangements a lot of flexibility. Instead of getting locked into one funeral home or even one city, the person who has been made responsible for funeral plans can do as he or she needs to do at the time.

How Does Burial Insurance Work?

These are actually modest whole life insurance policies. They have been specially designed by life insurance companies to make them easy for elderly people to apply and qualify for. In fact, there are even two kinds of burial insurance policies:

• Guaranteed issue: These ask absolutely no medical questions, and they accept any qualified applicant.
• Simplified issue: The applications ask a few medical questions, but they have been designed to accept the majority of reasonably healthy senior citizens.

For senior citizens with major health issues or disabilities, guaranteed issue policies provide one of the few ways that these older folks can get burial insurance at all. They may be the best choice for seniors and families who lack the savings to pay for a dignified funeral. However, it might be better to consider simplified issue policies for reasonably active and healthy seniors because they will be less expensive and have better benefits.

For example, any no-questions-asked burial policy will use waiting periods instead of medical underwriting. This means that the entire face value of the policy will not be payable until this waiting period, perhaps 24 to 36 months, has passed. Before that, the policies may return paid premiums or pay some fraction of the face value. On the other hand, policies that do ask health questions almost always pay a death benefit as soon as the policy is put in force.

How Much Does Burial Insurance Cost?

As with any kind of life insurance, premiums will depend upon location, age, health, tobacco use, and insurance company. We provide an online burial insurance quote form and our toll-free phone number. However, to help you understand average costs, these are some sample quotes.

These are sample burial insurance quotes for a 66-year old woman in California:

• $10,000: $42.61
• $15,000: $62.61
• $20,000: $82.61

Note: These sample prices are only used as examples, and they could be different because of location, insurance company, gender, smoking use, etc. However, these policies do not require any sort of physical exam, and most insurers offer coverage to people from age 50 to age 80 or even age 89.

Who Pays for Burial Policy Premiums?

In some cases, senior citizens will purchase coverage for themselves. But in many cases, a family member, usually an adult child or sibling, will offer to pay premiums because the elderly person to be covered lives on a fixed income. After all, the beneficiary of the policy will be the one to benefit the most, so many adult children or other family members are eager to cover the cost.

Compare Burial Life Insurance Quotes Online or By Phone

We provide the convenience of online burial policy quote forms and a commitment to customer service. Every senior and every family has different needs, and our only goal is to find the best solution for each client. Fill out our simple quote form or give us a call to see how we can help your family plan for funeral expenses.