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Guest Blog: Raising Awareness About the True Cost of Funerals

Guest Blog: Raising Awareness About the True Cost of Funerals

At Home Carers, we’re always looking for ways to share important conversations that affect families across New Zealand. One area that often comes as a shock to many is the cost of funerals.

Today’s guest blog comes from Death Without Debt, an organisation dedicated to raising awareness about funeral costs and advocating for more affordable, community-led options. Their work highlights how small changes to outdated systems could make a big difference for grieving families—ensuring dignity without leaving loved ones in debt.

We’re proud to share their perspective here. For more information and resources, you can:

Why is a nation of D.I.Y.ers spending so much on funerals?

If the Government would only fix a simple paperwork problem, the growing desire for D.I.Y. funerals would be free to flourish.

Coffin building clubs, family-led services, hatchback hearses, plug-in cooling pads from Holland (where costly embalming is virtually unknown) – more and more communities are gearing up to rebuild the D.I.Y. culture of old. However there is a spanner in the works.

Despite all the enthusiasm, New Zealanders are paying, on average, $13,000 per funeral. That’s far more than many households can afford.

A couple of years ago, a dying friend asked me to organise his cremation and other parts of the funeral process. Top of his mind was his wife’s financial welfare.

He died in the early morning. The doctor came around a few hours later. As the G.P. was about to go, we asked if he could send the paperwork direct to the second ‘referee’ doctor whose signature we needed to do the final sign-off for the cremation.

This was the first time this doctor had had such a request, but when the system was explained to him, he was happy to help. Two minutes and one email later, the job was done and he’d saved family and friends a great deal of stress and money.

The lead-up to that gracious act had, however, been a battle. It took dozens of phone calls and emails to find a way through the obscure system that surrounds that second, crucial, signature. No-one—not the medical centres, not Hospice, not the District Health Board, PHO—no-one was willing, or able, to help us. In fact, more than once we were berated for what we were trying to do – which was simply to stay out of debt.

“No, you must hire a funeral director,” one bossy medical manager said.

The doctor himself, so helpful in person, had been almost impossible to get through to beforehand. In the end we had to hire a social worker to get his attention.

The Ministry of Health is approaching the end of a 12-year review of burial, cremation and death. Calls for regulation of the funeral industry came in from a wide range of respected organisations including NZ Nurses and Age Concern, as well as grassroots advocates. Disturbing cases of exploitation were cited.

However, the scope of the review was narrow. Although regulation of the industry was on the table, the more basic question of how the funeral industry ended up with a captive market was missing from the consultation documents.

The answer, as you will have gathered, lies in the official paperwork requirements. The obstacles here, including the lack of first-hand or word-of-mouth precedents, mean most people aiming to D.I.Y. are getting derailed right from the start.

Regulations created in 1973 set out what was, for doctors, an unfamiliar paperwork system for cremation which they simply handed over to funeral directors to sort. Back then, cremation was rare. Now around 80% of us end up having our bodies cremated, and most doctors automatically refer families to funeral directors to get the paperwork sorted. The same happens for burial, even though burial paperwork is simple as pie. The result of this default of responsibility is a captive market for the funeral industry.

None of this is to say funeral directors don’t have an important role in society. In many instances, they are indispensable. However, funeral debt is not doing anyone any good—least of all the funeral industry. $13,000 (and often more) is far too much for the average family to be spending when those in the know are doing the entire funeral process for around a thousand.

An affordable funeral doesn’t mean skimping on dignity. Quite the reverse. People report the hands-on approach gets everyone involved and builds bonds and memories that help the grieving process.

The Ministry of Health claims a revamped, digitalised, medical referee system will solve the paperwork problem Death Without Debt is campaigning to get fixed. It won’t. Current after-death care fails the Health and Disability Code on nine out of ten patient rights, and the proposed modifications won’t change that.

The solution, which the Ministry of Health and the Health and Disability Commission are studiously avoiding, is incredibly simple: doctors and nurses would extend duty-of-care by a couple of minutes and complete the necessary paperwork. This works (we’ve trialled it), takes two minutes, costs nothing and leaves the community with less debt stress.

Death Without Debt has laid out nine further steps for the Government.

For more information, resources, and to support our work, visit deathwithoutdebt.org.nz or email info@deathwithoutdebt.org.nz.

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