How to pre-plan your own funeral (a practical guide)

A woman I know, Deborah, called me the week after her mother died. Not about grief, though that was there too. She called because she was standing in a funeral home showroom trying to pick a casket and she didn't know what her mother would have wanted. Oak or mahogany? Lined with velvet or satin? Open casket or closed? The funeral director was patient but every question felt like a small betrayal, like Deborah should have known the answer and didn't.

Her mother had opinions about everything. The right brand of peanut butter. The correct way to fold a towel. But she'd never said a word about her own funeral, and now Deborah was guessing at answers to questions that cost thousands of dollars each.

Pre-planning your funeral means putting those answers somewhere your family can find them. It doesn't require a lawyer, a deposit, or even a full afternoon. Most of the meaningful decisions take less time than picking a restaurant for dinner, and they save the people you love from making those same choices during the worst week of their lives.

What pre-planning actually involves

Pre-planning a funeral is just deciding what you want and writing it down. That's it. People sometimes confuse it with pre-paying, which is a separate step (and optional). The planning part costs nothing.

The biggest decision is disposition: do you want to be buried, cremated, or something else? If cremated, what should happen to the ashes? If buried, do you have a cemetery preference? This single choice shapes everything that follows.

From there, think about the type of service. A traditional funeral with a viewing? A memorial service without the body present? A celebration of life at someone's backyard? No service at all? All of these are valid, but your family won't know which one you'd pick unless you say so.

Location matters if you have a preference. A church, a funeral home chapel, a park, your living room. Name the specific place if one matters to you. Think about who speaks, too. Do you want a religious officiant? A friend? Your eldest child? Some people write their own remarks to be read by someone else, which takes this decision off the table entirely.

Then there are the smaller decisions that still carry weight. Specific songs or hymns. Poems or passages to be read. Whether you'd prefer flowers or donations to a cause. Whether the service is open to everyone or family only. Even a sentence about the tone you want ("keep it casual" or "I'd like something traditional") gives your family something to work toward instead of debate about.

Casket or urn preferences. You don't have to pick a specific model, but a direction helps. "Simple and affordable" gives your family permission to skip the $8,000 mahogany display piece without feeling cheap.

You can record these decisions on a single sheet of paper, in a death binder, or in a dedicated section of your end-of-life planning documents. The format matters less than the findability. If your plan is in a notebook nobody knows about, it's the same as having no plan.

Pre-paying: the financial side

Once you've made your decisions, you can also pay for them in advance. Funeral homes call this a "pre-need" arrangement. The appeal is straightforward: you lock in today's prices and spare your family the bill.

The National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) puts the 2023 median cost of a traditional funeral at $7,848, not counting the cemetery plot, headstone, or grave liner. That number has climbed about 4% per year over the past decade. A funeral that costs $8,000 today could cost $11,000 or more in ten years.

Pre-paying typically works in one of two ways:

Funeral trust. You put money into a trust managed by the funeral home or a third party. The funds grow with interest, ideally keeping pace with price increases. When you die, the trust pays the funeral home. If you cancel or switch providers, the terms for getting your money back vary by state and contract.

Funeral insurance (also called burial insurance or final expense insurance). You buy a small life insurance policy earmarked for funeral costs. The payout goes to your beneficiary, who uses it to pay the funeral home. This is more portable than a trust since the policy follows you, not the funeral home.

Both options have fine print worth reading carefully. The Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule requires funeral homes to provide itemized price lists so you can compare. Ask about:

What happens if you move to another state
Whether the plan is refundable if you cancel
What happens if the funeral home goes out of business
Whether excess funds get returned to your estate if costs come in under the pre-paid amount

A pre-paid plan that locks your family out of a refund if you relocate is worse than no plan at all. Ask the uncomfortable questions before you sign.

Some people skip pre-paying entirely and just earmark savings or add a payable-on-death designation to a bank account. That's a reasonable approach, especially if you're not sure where you'll be living in ten or twenty years.

How to write down your wishes so they actually get used

The plan is useless if nobody can find it. I've heard stories, more than once, of families discovering a filing cabinet full of carefully organized funeral instructions weeks after they'd already held the service and made every choice from scratch.

Keep your plan somewhere obvious and tell at least two people where it is. Your death binder is the natural home for it, alongside your insurance information, account numbers, and passwords. If you keep a digital version, make sure someone can access the file or platform without needing you alive to grant permission.

Here's what the document should cover, at minimum:

Cremation or burial (and specifics about what to do with the remains)
Type of service you want, or don't want
Where the service should happen
Any specific songs, readings, or speakers
Whether you've pre-paid and where the contract is
Who to notify (your funeral planning contacts, religious leader, workplace, social circles)

You don't need formal language. Something like this works:

"I want to be cremated. No viewing. I'd like a memorial service at the house, not at a funeral home. Keep it casual. Play 'Ripple' by the Grateful Dead at some point. Ask my brother Mike to say a few words if he's up for it. Scatter the ashes at Refugio Beach. I haven't pre-paid anything, but there's money in the Chase savings account ending in 4421. Use that."

That paragraph would save a family days of guessing.

A funeral planning checklist can help you make sure you haven't skipped anything. But even without a formal checklist, a written paragraph is miles ahead of silence.

Talking to your family about it

Writing the plan down is step one. Telling your family about it is step two, and for most people it's the harder step.

There's no way to make this conversation completely comfortable. But you can make it matter-of-fact instead of dramatic. You're not asking your family to confront your mortality; you're telling them where to find a document.

"I wrote down what I want for my funeral. It's in the blue binder in the office closet. I just wanted you to know it exists so you're not guessing someday." That's the whole conversation if you want it to be.

If your family wants to talk more, let them. Some people have questions. Others just nod and change the subject. Both responses are fine. The point isn't to have a deep philosophical discussion about death (though you can; there's a whole guide for that conversation with a spouse). The point is to make sure the people who will need the plan know where to find it.

One thing I've heard repeatedly from families who went through this: the relief was enormous. Not the conversation itself, which felt awkward at first, but the aftermath. Knowing the document existed, that the guesswork was gone, made the topic feel smaller. Less like a looming dread and more like a chore that's been handled.

Common concerns people have about pre-planning

People ask me if it's morbid. Writing down funeral preferences takes about twenty minutes and then you go on with your life. Filing your taxes is more depressing and you do that every year. Others say they're too young. Maybe. But if you have a partner, kids, or aging parents who depend on you, your age is less relevant than your responsibilities. The AARP's planning resources suggest starting whenever you have people who would be affected by your absence.

The "what if I change my mind" question comes up a lot. You probably will change your mind, and that's fine. A funeral plan isn't a contract (unless you've pre-paid, in which case check the terms). Update it whenever your preferences shift. People update their wills when life changes; funeral plans deserve the same occasional review.

The most common thing I hear, though, is some version of "my family will figure it out." They will. But they'll figure it out while crying, exhausted, possibly disagreeing with each other, and almost certainly spending more money than you would have chosen. Deborah spent $14,000 on her mother's funeral because she kept saying yes to upgrades she wasn't sure her mother wanted, just in case. Her mother was a woman who used coupons for toothpaste.

When to revisit your plan

A funeral plan isn't something you write once and forget. Life changes, and your plan should change with it.

Review it after a move, especially across state lines, since cemetery arrangements and funeral home contracts may not transfer. Review it after a divorce or remarriage, because the person responsible for carrying out your wishes may have changed. Review it after a major health diagnosis, because your timeline for needing the plan may have shortened and you may want to add or adjust details.

Even without a triggering event, flip through it every couple of years. Preferences drift. The song you wanted played in 2026 might feel wrong by 2032. The friend you wanted to speak might have moved across the country or you might have grown apart. A quick read-through every year or two keeps the plan honest.

Getting started today

You don't need a funeral home appointment or a lawyer to pre-plan. You need a piece of paper and a pen, or a computer and twenty uninterrupted minutes. Answer the eight or so questions from the first section of this article. Put the answers somewhere your family can find them. Tell someone the document exists.

That's the whole project.

If you want to be more thorough, use a final wishes organizer or a free end-of-life planning checklist to cover adjacent decisions like insurance, digital accounts, and personal letters.

If you're the type who'd rather do this digitally, When I Die Files lets you store funeral wishes alongside your account details, personal letters, and anything else your family will need. It beats a filing cabinet that only you know about.

Deborah told me later that the hardest part wasn't the casket or the flowers or even the money. It was the doubt. Standing in that showroom, surrounded by choices, with no way to know which one her mother would have picked. She said she would have given anything for a single page in her mother's handwriting saying what she wanted. Twenty minutes and a pen could have saved her months of second-guessing.