Three Things That Aren't a Funeral Plan (and One That Is)
Four different things get called "having it sorted," and they do four different jobs. People regularly have one and believe they have all of them. This is the short guide to which is which.
A caveat first: the detail varies between states and between countries, and nothing here is legal advice. Check the rules where you actually live. The shape of the distinction holds almost everywhere.
1. An advance care directive is about treatment while you are alive
An advance care directive, sometimes called a living will, records what medical treatment you would and would not want if you could not speak for yourself, and often names someone to decide on your behalf.
It is a serious and useful document and it is the one most worth having if you are choosing only one of these in a health crisis.
The thing to understand is when it stops applying. It governs decisions made while you are alive. It has nothing to say about your funeral, because by then the decisions it covers are over. People who have carefully completed one often believe the funeral question is handled. It is a different document for a different moment.
2. A will is about property
A will says who gets what, names an executor, and has to be made with the right formalities to work at all.
You can put funeral directions in one, and people do. What surprises most people is how little weight those directions carry. Legal Aid WA's guidance is that "normally, the executor of the deceased's will (or personal representative if there is no will) has the right to decide on the funeral arrangements as they think best."
There is a notable exception in Western Australia: a person cannot be cremated if they left written instructions, including in a will, that their body is not to be cremated. Beyond that kind of specific provision, the executor decides, informed by what they know of your wishes.
A will is also on a slower clock. The estate is handled over weeks and months. The funeral happens in days.
3. Funeral insurance, or a prepaid funeral, is about money
These two are not the same as each other, but they share a job: paying for it.
Funeral insurance pays a sum when you die. A prepaid funeral is an arrangement with a particular funeral director, bought in advance, and it does usually involve specifying some of what you want, which makes it the closest of the three to an actual plan.
Neither is widely held. Australian Seniors' Cost of Death 2.0 report, researched by CoreData, found that "close to 7 in 10 (69%) of over 50s don't have funeral insurance and have no plans to obtain it."
Whether either is good value for you is a real financial question and not one to settle from a blog. What they do not do, in themselves, is tell anybody what you wanted. A payout changes who pays the invoice, not who decides what is on it.
4. Written funeral wishes are about the decisions
This is the one with no legal standing at all, and it is the one that answers the questions actually being asked in the first forty eight hours.
Burial or cremation. A service or not, and roughly what sort. Where. Music or readings you care about. Who should be told. Where the practical things are kept.
It is not a legal instrument, it needs no witnesses, and it cannot be enforced. Its usefulness is entirely practical: the people making decisions about you have specific information instead of memory, at the moment they need it.
How they fit together
The advance care directive covers the hospital. The will covers the estate. Insurance or a prepaid plan covers the bill. The written wishes cover the week in between, which is the only one of the four with no professional whose job it is to get it right on your behalf.
If you have one of these and not the others, the gap is usually not where you think. Having a will is the most common form of "sorted," and a will is specifically the document least likely to be read in time to answer a question about music.