Guide
How to Handle a Funeral Without Being Exploited in Your Grief
The Transparency Guide to the Industry That Profits from Your Worst Day
This guide names every right the Funeral Rule gives you and every item you are entitled to decline.
For the person who has just lost someone and is being presented with a $15,000 funeral bill with line items they cannot question because they are grieving. The FTC Funeral Rule exists. You have rights. This guide names every one of them.
The Name It First Experience
The FTC Funeral Rule gives you the right to see an itemized price list, to provide your own casket, and to decline every optional item — and the funeral home is required by federal law to honor all of it. How to Handle a Funeral Without Being Exploited in Your Grief names what is legally required, what is your right to decline, and what the funeral home is selling you because they know that grief makes it nearly impossible to say no — and produces the documented list of every right you have and every call you can make before you sign. This guide is for the person who has just lost someone and is sitting across from a $15,000 itemized bill they do not have the capacity to dispute right now. The Transparency Guide to the Industry That Profits from Your Worst Day gives you the list of what is real and the rights you can exercise the moment you are ready.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What do you know about your rights in the funeral planning process — and what rights do you wish you had known before a previous experience?
- What is legally required in a funeral — and what is optional that is commonly presented as required?
- What would you want a family member to know before they walk into a funeral home to plan services?
Research basis
Grounded in bereavement and consumer vulnerability research on the funeral industry's pricing practices (Mitford, 1963 / updated FTC studies) / grief research (Worden, 2008) on the cognitive load of decision-making in acute loss / advance planning literature on the protective role of prior knowledge in reducing exploitation during grief states.
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