Everything a family needs before that week comes: what to do the first day, what to sign and what to refuse, how to check an old burial policy, and how to write down the service you want.
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The phone rings. By noon you are in a quiet room with a soft-spoken man, a box of tissues and a stack of forms. Your brother wants one thing. Your aunt wants another. Nobody can find your mother's burial policy. Somebody asks what she would have wanted, and you feel the answer turning into a number.
Nobody in that room is trying to hurt you. Most of them are good people. But they do this every day, and you have done it once or never. You don't know what is required and what is a choice. You don't know the prices can be had over the telephone. You don't know you can say no.
Every family said the same thing. I wish somebody had told us.
I'm Loretta Banks. I spent forty years in Memphis funeral homes, and I never sold a funeral to anybody. I was in the room. I heard what got said when the family stepped out. This book is what I would have told every one of those families if they had come to me a year sooner.
The national median for a funeral with viewing and burial was $8,300 in 2023, and that figure leaves out the cemetery. The family with the folder knows what every line on that bill is.
One line you strike from one bill can pay for this book.
Real pages from the real book. This is exactly what opens on your phone.
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The FTC Funeral Rule makes funeral homes answer price questions over the telephone from their price lists. They can't make you come in, and they can't make you give your name, address or phone number first.
Write down the one arrangement you want priced and say the same thing to two homes: "I am comparing prices for the same arrangement at different homes. Please give me the prices from your current price list." Then ask what sits outside that total. Write the date beside every number. You can do this tonight, with nobody sick and nobody rushing you.
That's one page. The book has 144.
What families get wrong, what is true, exactly what to do and what to say, and a short list of what goes in the folder.
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Loretta Banks · 144-page PDF · reads on any phone, tablet or computer · prints at home
I'm Loretta Banks. I have stood beside embalmers and funeral directors in rooms all over Memphis. I have known good ones who would start an explanation over a third time for a shaken son. I have also watched tired daughters agree to things just to make the questions stop.
Families brought the dress, the wig and the old photograph in a grocery sack. Over the years I saw what they knew and what nobody had told them. So I wrote it all down.
I am not selling you a funeral. I want you to know what you are choosing and what you are paying for, and I want your children to find what they need in one place.
Because the only time to do this calmly is when nobody is sick. An afternoon with this book and your mother's papers spares your family the guessing later.
Yes. Go straight to the first-day chapter and the chapter on what to sign. Both are written for a person with no time and a lot on her mind, and they open on your phone in a minute.
Chapter one gives you the exact words to start with, and what to do when she says everything is handled. A lot of families start with their own folder and let her correct it.
Yes. The FTC Funeral Rule covers funeral homes in every state, and VA and Social Security are national. Where state rules differ, the book tells you which office to call.
Then you need chapter eight most of all. It shows you how to read the policy line by line, find the company if the name has changed, spot a graded benefit, and pay the funeral home without signing over the whole policy.
It's a PDF, 144 pages. It opens on your phone, tablet or computer. Print the fill-in pages at home or at your library and put them in a plain folder from the drugstore.
Press any Buy button on this page. Pay once on the secure checkout. The page that opens right after you pay has your download button, and the same link is sent to your email. No account to set up, no password to remember.
No. One payment of $27, one time. No membership and no monthly anything.
The first day, the papers, the policy, the dress, the service, and one folder that holds it all.
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