Rising Funeral Costs Prompt Barbadians to Take Financial Preparations for Death Seriously

Barbadians are taking the financial preparations for their death more seriously.

This revelation has been made by president of the Barbados Association of Funeral Directors, Ian Griffith, who told the Nation team that coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic an increasing number of Barbadians have been going to funeral homes to pre-arrange and make down payments for their final send-off.

Griffith said the growing number of Barbadians pre-arranging their own funerals may be closely linked to higher funeral costs now compared to the past.

“Persons are looking at tailoring their funeral expenses to meet their budgets and that is one of the things that we try to guide people on. As more and more persons start to plan their own funerals, they start requesting quotations while they are alive to see what they would be looking at in case anything happens to them, or anything happen to the grandmother or their parents, they want to know what the funeral cost would look like. So more people have started to do pre-arrangements,” Griffith said.

As inflation rises, and other expenses increase throughout the supply chain, funeral expenses on the island have also been rising accordingly.

The Nation team spoke with Griffith, and managing director of Lyndhurst Funeral Home, Russell Griffith, about some of the factors that have been contributing to why funeral expenses have gone up.

Making it clear that funeral directors were not deliberately charging significant sums for funerals, Griffith also indicated that like other industries, funeral homes were also facing increasing operational costs.

“We have caskets coming from overseas. We have equipment and we have fluids that we use to embalm the bodies coming from overseas, and all those things went up in costs because of challenges in the shipping industry. The freight prices went up. In Barbados, lumber to build caskets went up, so that cost is going to come right back down to the consumer,” Griffith said.

“Like the supermarkets and any other place we can’t control the prices. The cost of building a house went up, the cost of doing some other business went up, cost of fuel has gone up, cost of transportation has gone up. Persons have to adjust how they conduct themselves in terms of daily activities and people have done the same thing when it comes to funerals, hence, more and more persons are pre-planning funerals,” Griffith continued.

Meanwhile, Russell said when looking at the cost of burying a loved one, people must consider the funeral home’s services and equipment that are charged for in addition to the entities that the home would do business with on their clients’ behalf.

Newspaper and radio stations, florists, casket builders, churches, crematorium, cemeteries, and live streamers, were just a few of the external entities that make a funeral possible.

“Someone would come to me and want 300 hymn sheets, the biggest advertisement in the paper and live streaming of the entire funeral. Another person would want the simple advertisement, maybe 100 hymn sheets, and tell me that livestreaming is not necessary.