This has seen the price of dying continue to go up, with residents faced with the reality that burying their loved ones is becoming less affordable.
The News looked at this topic through the lens of a funeral home, by chatting with Garry Merritt from Merritt Funeral Services, and put together all the costs to figure out what it costs to die in the GV.
Here’s an excerpt from that episode.
Nicola Ceccato: I know there has been quite a bit of changes when it comes to increases to burial and internment charges at the cemetery.
We saw it go up back in July last year at Shepparton Cemetery for both general plots and for lawn plots with an increase by 275 per cent just for general plots and 500 per cent for burying a child.
When that change went through in July, did you find it quite hard to be able to give quoted prices, say for people that had already planned it before those charges came in?
Garry Merritt: When they go up like that and look, we had no say, and we just found out like everybody else that they’d put the prices up.
They just sent us a price increase and that does put us into a bit of a sticky situation when I was talking about the prepaids because if we’ve done a prepaid on a price at the cemetery and for that to jump up so high, when the time comes, the funeral director is probably going to lose out because it’s gone up.
That’s why a lot of the funeral directors now, they’re a bit hesitant to do the prepaids because when the time comes, if the cemeteries keep putting up things like that, we’re going to lose out.
It comes out of our pocket, and you can’t put it back on the families and say, oh look, the cemeteries have gone up, because that’s not what prepaids are all about.
Nicola: Have you ever seen prices go up that astronomically high?
Garry: No, never. We’re coming up nearly 11 years in business and yeah, look, it goes up CPI (consumer price index) every year, which is, you know, that’s fine but to go up like that, is pretty hard to take, really.
And look, it’s hard. I don’t know their reasoning for putting it up so much, but I mean, it doesn’t encourage us to put forward their name for cemeteries when you’ve got other cemeteries that aren’t as dear.
Shepparton Lawn Cemetery is a really nice cemetery, but a plot out there now is $5800 and that is a lot of money just for a plot and some people don’t have the money, or the kids who are burying their parents, they don’t have that money.
Nicola: When you first started in this business as well in 2014, how much of a change in prices have you seen from when you first started to now?
Garry: Yeah, it has increased, and a lot of it more so is the cemetery costs, that’s a lot of it.
I mean, we do have price rises, but we don’t do it every year, but I would think, when you look at an average funeral around the GV, with a burial, it used to be around $8000 or $9000.
Now you're looking at about $12,000 to $15,000.
Nicola: What is the cheapest way to die in the GV?
Garry: Well, the cheapest way, which a few people are doing, it’s called a straight cremation.
So a straight cremation is where you have no service, we transfer the deceased from where they pass away, bring them back to the funeral parlour, we get everything organised, they can have a viewing if they want, we organise the cremation, the coffin, all the paperwork, and then the ashes come back to us, and then we ring the family to come and get the ashes.
So that is the cheapest way to do it, which is around $4000.
Listen more to what Garry had to say by listening to the full episode here: tinyurl.com/costtodieinGV
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