What to Do When There's No Money for a Funeral

If you've been struggling with money your entire life, and you're advanced in years or gravely ill, death must seem like a cosmic prank. Who wants to consider that after a lifetime of scrounging, you (or your loved ones) can't afford to pay your final bill?

It's a serious problem that seems to have grown worse over the years and one that spiked during the recession. There is no organization that tracks unclaimed bodies, but coroners throughout the country, in local news stories, have reported that the numbers are climbing. In 2011, Oregon cremated 30 percent more unclaimed corpses than the year before. In 2012, in Myrtle Beach, S.C., the coroner asked the county to create a special cemetery for unclaimed bodies due to a lack of dignified space to put the remains.

So what does one do if there is no money for a funeral? After all, death, like taxes, is a sure thing, and if you have a great aunt drawing her last breath, you can't very well ask her to hang around for a few months while you raise funds for a proper send-off. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, in 2012, the average cost for an adult funeral was $7,775, which doesn't include cemetery costs.

If you lack the funding for a funeral, here's what some experts say your options are.

If there's time, prepay the funeral expenses. This isn't an option if death occurs unexpectedly, but if you know the inevitable is coming, prepaying can help you find more time to gather the money, and get the financial stress out of the way now.

After all, "planning a funeral is not something you want to do at the spur of the moment, in your height of grief," says Lacy Robinson, senior professional development trainer at Aurora Casket Company, based out of Aurora, Ind., and one of the nation's largest casket manufacturers.

[Read: Should You Prepay Your Own Funeral Expenses?]

Consumers can usually pay in installments or all at once, but they ideally want to time it a year or two before a death rather than, say, 10 years. Despite the many honest and ethical funeral homes, there are cases where people have been billed for expenses after the funeral. Costs also rise, and not all prepayment plans keep prices locked in. Funeral homes can be bought by a company that won't honor prepaid commitments.

Also, prepaying can be advantageous for low-income individuals facing late-life health issues by reducing their assets and allowing them to become eligible for Medicare.

When her mother's health problems landed her in a nursing home last summer, Sandra Beckwith, 58, a freelance writer and author in Fairport, N.Y., prepaid the funeral with her mother's income. "If I hadn't done that, I would have had to pass the hat among siblings when the time came to pay," Beckwith says, "and we didn't want to do that if we didn't have to."

Beckwith, whose 84-year-old mother is still fortunately among the living, prepaid $8,000 to the funeral home, most of which came from her mother's meager assets, as well as $1,500 that Medicaid kicked in. Medicaid will allow as much as $1,500 (approximately; amount varies state to state) to be counted toward a funeral instead of as assets.

For a funeral, $1,500 "is not nearly enough," says Beckwith. But it's better than what Social Security offers. A surviving spouse or child who is eligible for benefits receives $255 to go toward burial costs.

Have a budget, no-frills funeral. Many of your costs can drop with a little forethought. That can be hard if you're in the throes of grief, but you should try to remember:

Cremation is considerably cheaper than an open funeral. The average cost, according to the Cremation Association of North America, is $1,650, which includes a memorial service. Without the memorial service, an average cremation is $725.

If you're cremating, the service could be held in a place other than a funeral home to bring costs down, says Barbara Newman Mannix, president of A Dignified Life, which specializes in planning end-of-the-life issues, like estate planning and enrolling in a nursing home, for people in New York City and surrounding areas. "You could have the service at a park, a church, or another no- or low-cost venue, so you don't have to pay for a service or funeral venue," says Mannix.

It's also a good idea to be upfront with the funeral director about your finances. "Every funeral home sees a variety of families, some who have just a little bit of money or virtually nothing," Robinson says.

[Read: 5 Things to Remember When Your Finances Are Falling Apart.]

In other words, if you're low on funds, funeral directors get it, and the best of them will steer you to inexpensive alternatives. Marty Strohofer, vice president of marketing at Aurora Casket Company, says there are cheaper caskets than the many that go for $2,000 or $3,000 and higher. He says you can opt for a 20-gauge steel casket, which is priced closer to $1,000, or a cloth-covered casket, which can be found in the $500 range.

The elements of a funeral service don't have to be expensive, Robinson says. You could bring in your own flowers rather than buying them through the funeral home, for example.

Donate the body to science. Like pre-planning a funeral, this is a decision best made before death. It may sound creepy to some, but there's no question that people who leave their body to medical science are doing a service, and most medical research facilities that accept bodies handle all of the transportation and burial costs. In fact, many research facilities offer an annual memorial service for those who have donated their body to medical science, and if you prefer not to receive an urn of ashes, many will put the body in a repository for bones or bodies of the dead.

But do your research first. For starters, donating your body to science is different than donating organs (since the organs are taken but the body sticks around for the funeral), and if you donate your body, you can't also be an organ donor (researchers don't want your body without the organs).

Family members may get your remains fairly quickly. MedCure, based in Portland, Ore., will send the cremated ashes to family members four to six weeks after death. Science Care, based in Phoenix, returns them three to five weeks later. But many facilities won't return the remains for two or three years, which may bother some family members who are looking for the closure of scattering ashes.

You could not claim the body. Nobody is suggesting you don't claim a loved one. But if you're low on funds and you can't see any other option for a distant relative or acquaintance, unclaimed bodies are taken care of by the local or state government.

[See Get-Out-of-Debt Resolutions for 2013]

If you go that route, "you'll never know what happened to them," says a pained-sounding Mannix.

Often, unclaimed bodies are cremated by the local government and the remains are held until something can be done with them. Every year, Los Angeles holds a mass funeral for unclaimed bodies; last December, mourners, chaplains, and county officials said goodbye to 1,656 people, most of whom died in 2009. It's also common for an unclaimed body to be offered to a medical school for research or perhaps sent to a body farm, where human decomposition is studied.

In which case, you may be better off not knowing what happened.

Striking Greek journalists caused a media blackout on Tuesday

Greeks Strike Against Austerity – Again

Stephen: It seems to me that the smaller the country, the more active the general populace is in showing that they want to to live in a world that works for everyone. Or maybe it’s just easier to bring everyone together in a smaller nation? Take Iceland, Ireland and Greece as examples…

Greeks in Fresh General Strike Against Austerity

From BBC News Europe – February 20, 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21515012

Greece is being hit by the first general strike of 2013 as workers renew their protest over austerity measures.

The 24-hour strike is forcing the closure of schools and state-run offices and leaving hospitals working with emergency staff.

The strike has been called by Greece’s two biggest labour unions, representing half the four million-strong workforce.

It comes days before international lenders are due in Athens to discuss the next instalment of a bailout.

The debt-ridden country is being kept afloat by billions of euros from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund.

In return, the government has imposed waves of unpopular spending cuts and tax rises, hitting pay and pensions and sending unemployment soaring to more than 26%.

Our struggle will continue for as long as these policies are implemented”

- Greek private sector union GSEE

Strikes and violent protests have become commonplace.

Greece’s coalition government managed to secure the latest tranche of bailout money at the end of last year, and Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras told the BBC he believed the worst was over for his country.

However, the BBC’s Athens correspondent Mark Lowen says that Wednesday’s strike is a reminder that government confidence of a slowly improving economic situation is not shared by many on the streets.

Marches

Union leaders say they are angry at the job cuts and tax rises being demanded by Greece’s international lenders.

“The (strike) is our answer to the dead-end policies that have squeezed the life out of workers, impoverished society and plunged the economy into recession and crisis,” the private sector union GSEE said in a statement.

“Our struggle will continue for as long as these policies are implemented,” it said.

The union is organising the walkout with public sector union Adedy.

Several marches are due to culminate in protests outside parliament in Syntagma square, Athens, where violent clashes have broken out on previous occasions.

Our correspondent says the only difference between Wednesday’s strike and earlier protests is that public transport has been for the most part unaffected. Buses are still operating and air traffic controllers are not on strike, he says.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s eight-month-old government has taken a tough line on strikers, invoking emergency law twice this year to order seamen and metro staff back to work.

But despite such measures, strikes have recently picked up.

A one-day visit by French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday went largely unreported because Greek journalists downed tools.

Winter storm slams into the Midwest

Storm moving into Plains blamed for fatal crash

By JIM SALTER | Associated Press – 7 hrs ago

ST. LOUIS (AP) — An armada of snow plows and salt spreaders deployed Wednesday on highways across the nation's heartland as a winter storm that's already blamed for one death promised to dump up to a foot of snow in some areas and bring freezing rain and sleet to others.

Winter storm warnings were issued from Colorado through Illinois. By midday Wednesday, heavy snow was already falling in Coloradoand western Kansas. In Oklahoma, roads were covered with a slushy mix of snow and ice that officials said caused a crash that killed an 18-year-old man.

National Weather Service meteorologist Jayson Gosselin said parts of Colorado, Kansasand northern Missouri could get 10 to 12 inches of snow. Dodge City, Kan., was bracing for up to 16 inches of snow. Farther south, freezing rain and sleet already were making driving treacherous.

Cody Alexander, 18, of Alex, Okla., died when the pickup truck he was driving skidded out of control in slush on State Highway 19, crossed into oncoming traffic and was hit by a truck, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said. The other driver was not seriously injured.

In northern Arkansas a school bus crashed Wednesday afternoon on a steep, snowy country road, leaving three students and the driver with minor injuries. Pope County Sheriff Aaron Duval said the bus slid off a road on Crow Mountain, nearly flipping before it was stopped by trees at the roadside.

Officials feared the winter storm would be the worst in the Midwest since the Groundhog Day blizzard in 2011. A two-day storm that began Feb. 1, 2011, was blamed for about two dozen deaths and left hundreds of thousands without power, some for several days. At its peak, the storm created white-out conditions so intense that Interstate 70 was shut down across the entire state of Missouri.

"We're not going to see that type of storm, but it's certainly the most impactful in the last two winters," said Gosselin, who works in suburban St. Louis.

Tim Chojnacki, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Transportation, said it planned to have salt trucks on the roads before the storm arrived in the Show-Me State in hopes that the precipitation would largely melt upon impact.

Much of Kansas was expected to get up to a foot of snow, which many rural residents welcomed after nearly a year of drought.

Jerry and Diane McReynolds spent part of Wednesday putting out more hay and straw for newborn calves at their farm near Woodston in north central Kansas. The storm made extra work, but Diane McReynolds said it would help their winter wheat, pastures and dried-up ponds.

"In the city you hear they don't want the snow and that sort of thing, and I am thinking, 'Yes, we do,' and they don't realize that we need it," she said. "We have to have it or their food cost in the grocery store is going to go very high. We have to have this. We pray a lot for it."

Meanwhile, a separate snow storm caught many drivers by surprise in California, leaving hundreds stranded on mountain highways. A 35-mile stretch of Highway 58 between Mojave and Bakersfield was closed Wednesday, and several school districts closed. No injuries were reported.

Schools also were closed in northern Arizona and Colorado with snow there. Mindy Crane, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation, said hundreds of plows had been deployed for what was expected to be one of the most significant snow storms of the season.

Just the threat of snow led to a series of shutdowns in the middle of the country. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback closed state government from Thursday morning through Friday morning and urged residents to stay off the roads.

Lawmakers in Nebraska and Iowa cancelled committee meetings and hearings, and the Arkansas Senate voted to recess until Monday so lawmakers could make it home before the worst of the storm hit. University of Nebraska officials moved a Big Ten men's basketball game against Iowa from Thursday to Saturday.

Gosselin said precipitation is generally expected to drop off as the storm makes its way east. Chicago and parts of Indiana, he said, could get about 2 inches of snow and some sleet.

___

NASA Sees Monster Sunspot Growing Fast, Solar Storms Possible

A colossal sunspot on the surface of the sun is large enough to swallow six Earths whole, and could trigger solar flares this week, NASA scientists say.

The giant sunspot was captured on camera by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory as it swelled to enormous proportions over the 48 hours spanning Tuesday and Wednesday (Feb. 19 and 20). SDO is one of several spacecraft that constantly monitor the sun's space weather environment.

"It has grown to over six Earth diameters across, but its full extent is hard to judge since the spot lies on a sphere, not a flat disk," wrote NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox, of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in an image description.

The sunspot region is actually a collection of dark blemishes on the surface of the sun that evolved rapidly over the last two days. Sunspots form from shifting magnetic fields at the sun's surface, and are actually cooler than their surrounding solar material.

According to Fox, some of the intense magnetic fields in the sunspot region are pointing in opposite directions, making it ripe for solar activity.

"This is a fairly unstable configuration that scientists know can lead to eruptions of radiation on the sun called solar flares," Fox explained.

The sun is currently in the midst of an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and is expected to reach peak activity sometime this year. The current sun weather cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory launched in 2010 and is just one of a fleet of spacecraft keeping close watch on the sun for signs of solar flares, eruptions and other space weather events.

Mexico security forces abducted dozens in drug war: rights group

Photographs of five of the six young men abducted by soldiers are seen at a desk in Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero February 20, 2013. REUTERS/Tomas Bravo

IGUALA, Mexico (Reuters) - Dozens of people were abducted and murdered by Mexican security forces over the past six years during a gruesome war with drug cartels, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, urging President Enrique Pena Nieto to overhaul the military justice system.

The rights group said that since 2007 it has documented 149 cases of people who were never seen again after falling into the hands of security forces, and that the government failed to properly investigate the "disappearances."

"The result was the most severe crisis of enforced disappearances in Latin America in decades," the U.S.-based group said. (Human Rights Watch report: http://r.reuters.com/fyk26t)

It recommended reforming Mexico's military justice system and creating a national database to link the missing with the thousands of unidentified bodies that piled up during the military-led crackdown on drug cartels.

The report was a grim reminder of the dark side of the war on drug cartels that killed an estimated 70,000 people during former President Felipe Calderon's six-year presidency.

The report also illustrates the obstacles that President Pena Nieto, who took office in December, faces in trying to stem the violence, restore order over areas of the country controlled by the drug cartels and end abuses by security forces.

For nearly three years, 56-year-old shopkeeper Maria Orozco has sought to discover the fate of her son. She says he was abducted along with five colleagues by soldiers from the nightclub where they worked in Iguala, a parched town south of the Mexican capital.

She says a grainy security video, submitted anonymously, shows the moment in 2010 when local soldiers rounded up the men.

"We used to see the military like Superman or Batman or Robin. Super heroes," said Orozco. "Now the spirit of the whole country has turned against them."

Hers was one of the cases illustrated in the Human Rights Watch report.

Pena Nieto has vowed to take a different tack to his predecessor Calderon and focus on reducing violent crime and extortion rather than on going head to head with drug cartels.

The government last month introduced a long-delayed law to trace victims of the drug war and compensate the families. It says it is moving ahead with plans to roll out a genetic database to track victims and help families locate the disappeared.

"There exists, in theory, a database with more than 27,000 people on it," said Lia Limon, deputy secretary of human rights at Mexico's interior ministry. "It's a job that's beginning."

Still, impunity remains rife. The armed forces opened nearly 5,000 investigations into criminal wrongdoing between 2007 and 2012, but only 38 ended in sentencing, according to Human Rights Watch.

In its report it describes the impact of the disappearances on victims' families, a daily reality for Ixchel Mireles, a 50-year-old librarian from the northern city of Torreon, whose husband Hector Tapia was abducted by men in federal police uniforms.

Neither Mireles nor her daughter has heard from Tapia since that night in June 2010.

"I want him to be alive, but the reality just destroys me," said Mireles. "I just want them to give him back, even if he is dead."

Since her husband's disappearance, Mireles has struggled financially, having lost his 40,000 pesos ($3,143) a month salary. She has moved her daughter to a cheaper university and can barely keep up payments on her house.

"I now travel by foot," she said, noting that Mexico's social security system does not recognize the disappeared.

Some family members of the disappeared have asked for soldiers guilty of rights abuses to be judged like civilians, a move Mexico's Supreme Court has approved.

"To us it just seems that the military is untouchable," said Laura Orozco, 36, who says she witnessed her brother's military-led abduction. "They're bulletproof."

($1 = 12.73 pesos)

(Additional reporting by Michael O'Boyle,; Editing by Simon Gardner, Kieran Murray and Lisa Shumaker)