I know for certain that plain pine boxes are just fine in Texas; a cabinetmaker buddy actually was commissioned to make one some time ago. He was surprisingly proud of how it turned out. I imagine that if you really wanted to, you could have someone slap one together out of cheap plywood and that would do the job.
I suspect that for burials, the plot itself and the required-by-law concrete vault are what would get you cost-wise at that point.
If the person had Medicaid, there may be a burial benefit. Here it is $1200.00, and I have a funeral home that will retrieve the body, cremate it and give the survivors the ashes for an assignment of the benefit.
If the deceased was a veteran, I believe the Veterans Administration has a $2000.00 burial benefit. It would probably similar, where the funeral home would just take an assignment of the benefit.
As far as direct pay, I don’t know.
ETA: By “here” I mean Indiana.
It’s important to distinguish between a “funeral” and disposing of a body.
A funeral is a quasi-religious gathering for survivors. Disposing of a body is a semi-regulated process that can happen without a funeral. Funerals in all but name (i.e. memorial services) can happen without bodies.
When my Dad died (California) we looked at the various caskets. The least of the bunch (hidden behind a curtain you had to ask to see behind) looked like a standard shipping crate. Unpainted 1/2" plywood sides & top, 3/4" ply for a bottom, 2x2’s roughly nail-gunned all around for stiffening. No sanding, no finishing, no interior. It was also real small, so a typical adult would have been folded up to fit inside.
I’ve seen better-made pallets using nicer lumber.
I do not now recall the asking price, but it was way more than the same thing direct from a packing & freighting company would have cost.
Crematoriums will sell you an alternate container, which is essentially a cardboard box that’s a good deal less expensive than even plywood.
Boy, how times have changed. I remember (seemingly not that long ago) that the local Cremation Society charged $500 or so. But I just looked it up: $1300 for members ($95 membership fee), $1600 non-members. Discount for couples joining.
Hmm, just checked in another state and quickly found a place that does direct cremation for $495.
Local competition and availability affects things.
Note: there’s a national “cremation society” (named after a sea god), that IIRC isn’t considered all that great.
I think that might be for non-National Cemetery burials. It sure looks like if you were a veteran, that they’ll bury you and take care of the marker for free if you opt to be buried in a National Cemetery.
Cremation for $345 all-in. They transported, kept body for a couple of days until we could all gather, allowed us to use a room for a viewing, removed devices from the body, cremated remains, brought the ashes in a cardboard container to our house, and transferred the ashes from the container to a nice urn we bought from them for $70.
VA reimbursed us.
Across the street from Cheetahs (as seen in Showgirls).
Just checked their website - it’s $425 now.
The laws vary some from US state to state. To paraphrase the actor, dying is cheap, processing is expensive.
In Indiana, embalming is required if you pay someone to transport the body. It’s probably a good idea to have the death certified, but after that, if you don’t turn Pa over to the pros, you can dodge a lot of the process. You may bury the body anywhere you have permission from the land owner to do it. Indiana law requires at least 4 feet from the surface of the ground to the top of the casket (or the body, if you don’t use a casket,) for burial.
Dumping ashes into a body of water might conflict with clean water regs, but I wouldn’t worry about that being a problem. It’s done all the time. If you want to scatter on the ground, again you must have permission from the owner of the land.
If you want to bury Uncle Cy in the back yard or the north 40, it’s legal. If your tradition calls for the corpse to be left in the open, to let the vultures pick the bones clean, you can even do that.
Many mortuaries have rental caskets for showing the body before cremation. There’s a hatch at one end through which the body is removed in a cardboard liner. The fancy fabric is replaced for every customer.
Vegas is cheap, apparently.
In Oregon, 2015. Cremated my mother, included transport and body preparation (if we wanted a showing), and some additional copies of the certificates, $815.
We also cremated a child that we lost at 32 weeks of pregnancy, and it was only ~$300 for transport and cremation services, maybe even a bit less.
Jewish law and tradition* insist on a cheap funeral. No flowers. The deceased should not be embalmed. They should wear only a shroud and (here I disagree) it should be a closed casket ceremony. The coffin should be a cheap piece of wood both so that no money is wasted and so the body can decompose thoroughly and return to the earth. Previously, I had known about and seen plain pine boxes with rope handles. When my father died, I learned of the even cheaper cardboard coffin.
Oh, and among certain Orthodox groups the custom of just throwing some dirt on the coffin after it has been lowered into the grave is taken to its logical conclusion. The cemetery digs the grave. The mourners shovel all the dirt back in themselves.
At the time, I learned a great deal about transporting Dad’s corpus from Florida to Philadelphia. I’ve since forgotten almost all of it. None of it came in handy as Mom opted to have him cremated instead. We then illegally scattered his ashes off a pier.
In a purely economic sense dying is a much better choice than living – much cheaper!
a documentary film was made about people in LA who died with no friends or relatives. It was quite a few people each year. They try for a while to contact someone to take the body but after a while they cremate the body and put the ashes in a common grave. They hold onto their stuff for a while longer and eventually give some of it to charity.
Where I live (Kansas), so long as you aren’t within a city’s limits that might prohibit it, it’s perfectly legal to go out to the back 40 and dig a hole and bury someone. In fact, I know someone who did precisely this with his deceased elderly mother. His neighbors called the sheriff on him (because there was some question whether she was really dead before he buried her). A deputy came out and the guy showed the deputy a death certificate and all was fine.
So free would be the answer.
Thanks. Good info. I haven’t had one of those yet, but it’s a matter of time.
The NY Times published an article late last year that followed the story of one dead guy who was not claimed by next of kin. In NYC (presumably the state, but the article only mentions NYC) the estates of unclaimed deceased are managed by the county public administrator. The article is morbid by definition, but you’ll almost certainly find it interesting based on your questions in the OP.
Just so you know, the idea of funeral homes being small businesses is (mostly) a myth. 60 minutes did a story on this YEARS ago. Unfortunately, this was so long ago that I can’t find it on YouTube. And it explains why funeral expenses tend to be incredibly high.
60 Minutes discovered that there was one or two corporations in the U.S. that owned almost all of the funeral homes in the country. They fool you because when the corporations take over, they don’t change the name of the funeral home. There’s no real competition because of this – You can go to visit EVERY single funeral home in the same town, and every one could be owned by the same corporation, and you’d never know it. So they can keep prices high, and you have people on these boards thinking that there’s nothing wrong with paying $1000 to stick uncle Jasper’s body in an oven and his remains in a coffee can. It happens because of a little something called a ‘monopoly’.
I don’t know for a fact whether any of this has changed, but I suspect that if it has, it would be by there being even fewer privately-owned funeral homes, or maybe by funeral home franchises (which would be just as bad).
All of that sounds like the famous book The American Way Of Death, by Jessica Mitford (among the least objectionable among them, I gather… ), which caused quite a stir when it came out in 1963.
Cite?
The government does that all the time with emergency rooms.