The Cost of Dying: Why Final Expense Planning Is a Gift to Your Family

Today on Chat with Nat, Natalie Kime is talking about something most families do not want to talk about: dying.

More specifically, what happens financially when someone passes away?

After walking through her mom’s funeral, burial, travel, cultural traditions, family meals, flowers, death certificates, and unexpected expenses, Natalie shares what she learned about the real cost of dying and why final expense planning matters so much.

This episode is not meant to be morbid or scary. It is meant to be practical, honest, and loving.

Natalie explains that families prepare financially for college, weddings, homes, retirement, cars, and houses, but many avoid preparing for the one expense every family will eventually face: final expenses.

Using national funeral cost estimates and her own family’s recent experience, Natalie walks listeners through what is often included in a funeral package, what is not included, what cremation may actually cost, and why the question should not only be, “What does a funeral cost?”

The better question is:

How much money will my family actually need when I die?

Natalie also shares why life insurance, final expense policies, dedicated savings, prepaid funeral arrangements, and a red folder can help families avoid scrambling for money, opening credit cards, borrowing from relatives, or starting a GoFundMe during one of the most painful moments of their lives.

The goal is not to leave your family a bill.

The goal is to leave them a plan.

What You Will Hear

• Why families avoid talking about death and final expenses
• Why preparation is one of the greatest gifts you can give the people you love
• What the National Funeral Directors Association estimates for funeral and cremation costs
• Why an $8,000 to $10,000 funeral estimate may not include the full picture
• What may be included in a traditional funeral package
• What often costs extra, including flowers, cemetery fees, travel, food, death certificates, and headstones
• Why Natalie’s family’s total cost for her mom’s funeral was around $30,000 before the headstone
• Why cremation can be less expensive, but not automatically inexpensive
• The difference between direct cremation, cremation with viewing, and cremation with a memorial service
• Why final expense planning should begin with what your family will actually need
• How grief makes financial decisions harder
• Why immediate access to money matters after a death
• The difference between having assets and having cash available
• Why Natalie personally carries a $50,000 final expense policy
• How a red folder can keep grieving loved ones from becoming detectives
• The five questions every family should answer before crisis hits
• Why preparation cannot remove grief, but can remove an added financial burden

Thank you for listening to Chat With Nat: Caregiving, Money & Real Life Solutions. This podcast is your trusted guide for caregiving strategies, caregiver support, long-distance caregiving tips, financial planning for families, and managing caregiver burnout. Each week, we provide actionable advice, expert interviews, real caregiver stories, and practical tools to help you navigate caregiving challenges, protect your finances, and care with confidence.

Whether you’re caring for aging parents, managing adult children with special needs, or balancing caregiving with work, Chat With Nat is here to help you care smarter, avoid burnout, and feel supported every step of the way.

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Transcript

1:00:00

Hey friends, welcome back to Chat With Nat, conversations that count. I'm gonna start off by apologizing to my editor and producer because I guarantee when they listen to this, they're gonna notice the difference in sound. But I used to have a desktop that would raise up and down. My whole desk doesn't, but my desktop didn't. I got sick and tired of that sucker, so I got rid of it, which means I also got rid of the mount for my podcast microphone. And so I'm gonna have to figure out something different with my microphone, and this week, we're just going with the computer sound. So hopefully my voice comes through clearly today.(Upbeat Music) Today, we are talking about something most of us don't particularly wanna talk about, dying. More specifically, what happens financially when a person passes away? We prepare financially for so many milestones in life. For college, for weddings, down payments on homes, we prepare for retirement, and we insure our cars in our houses. There's one expense that every single family will eventually face for every single member of the family. And somehow we still don't like talking about it. And that is final expenses. Look, I know why we don't like to talk about it. My brother and I avoided talking to our parents about it for years until a diagnosis came up that made us realize there was a timeframe. Now we had a pretty realistic timeframe. And the truth is my mom was right spot on with that timeframe we were given, okay? So I wanna take the time today to take the emotion out of the conversation for a few minutes and just simply talk about the numbers. I'm not trying to be morbid. I am not trying to scare you. What I am doing is what I believe is extremely important. And that is talk about the preparation. Being prepared is one of the greatest gifts that we can give to the people that we love. And my family thought we were prepared and we're still surprised by some of the costs that were not included in the funeral package. So I'm first gonna talk about what does the National Funeral Directors Association estimate costs of a funeral for, okay? And we'll go through that breakdown. I'll give some comparisons to what we actually paid for mom throughout this episode as well. But according to their general price list, the median cost of an adult funeral with viewing in burial is approximately$8,300. Now a burial vault added to that because it's not included for some reason and it rises to $9,995. So let's just call it 10,000. Here's what's important. That still isn't necessarily the final bill. That number doesn't include cemetery expenses, a monument or grave marker, flowers, obituary charges, receptions and other outside expenses. But let's first start by breaking down what's actually inside the 8,300. The typical national median funeral home expenses are as follows. The funeral director and staff services, $2,495. This is the professional services portion, coordinating arrangements, doing paperwork, getting permits, all the logistics that happen behind the scenes. The transfer of your loved one to the funeral home. Now this is if you are local because our transfer costs were about 10 times this, but it's $395. Think about that for a second. One of the very first things that happens after somebody passes can already cost a family several hundred dollars. And balmy, $845. Other preparation of the body, $295. That's gonna include things as dressing, cosmetics, grooming, preparing your loved one for the viewing. Facilities and staff for the viewing, $475. Facilities and staff for the funeral ceremony, $550. A hearse, $375. A service car or van to transport the family, $175. Basic memorial printed package, $195. And then we get to one of the biggest individual extensors. A median metal burial casket runs about $2,500. Now this is nationwide, so I'm gonna roll with it because the median casket pricing at the mortuary, excuse me, the cemetery that we looked at would have been higher than that $2,500. And the casket my dad picked for my mom was almost double that $2,500. So those prices added together, you're approximately at $8,300. Now remember I said transferring my mom's body was about 10 times as much. Yep, it was around $4,000 because we transferred her from Texas back to Utah. My mom's casket was not $2,500, it was $4,800. Flowers are not included in the funeral package, that was another $1,200. Travel for those of us in Texas to get there and back home was another $5,000 to $6,000 easy. Because when a funeral happens, you don't get to plan six weeks out to get a great price on airline tickets and most airlines don't give bereavement fares anymore, believe it or not. And so you pay what you pay. But this is somebody that you love, so of course you're gonna pay it. But why aren't we getting better prepared for it? If a cemetery requires a vault, the national medium vault price reported by NFDA was another $1,695 on top of the $8,300 and that's what gets us to the $99.95. However, we selected a sealed vault for my mom, that was another $3,900. And even at that, you're not necessarily finished. Here are some of the expenses that people most often forget. Number one, please pay attention because these can add up to a lot of money and should be planned for with everything else, okay? So when somebody says the average funeral's around eight to $10,000, it's easy to think, okay, we need 10 grand, not necessarily. Because there can be an entire second layer of expenses. You've got cemetery costs. And depending on the cemetery and location, you may be separately paying for the burial plot. Now, my mom's burial plot was already purchased and paid for it, but you've got to purchase a burial plot. Opening and closing of the grave has its own fee. Internment services, a grave liner or vault, the headstone or monument. We have not ordered my mom's yet. Our total price tag for my mom's funeral is right around $30,000, including travel, including food for the family eatings and things that we did. Easily 30 grand. And we have not gotten the headstone or monument yet. And so far through the cemetery, we've been quoted $4,800. Now I have a friend whose father passed, I think a week or two after my mom. And she posted something about the cost of the headstone. And a lot of people told her, go to a private company. And she actually did. And I think cut her costs in half. So I'm definitely going to be, when we're ready to get that ordered and lock that in, I'm definitely going to be reaching out to some private companies to look into that. But you're still going to have a fee at the cemetery for them to allow this other company to come in and place the marker, okay? So then on top of that, so you have purchasing the monument or the headstone, you have installing it, and then you have cemetery maintenance or other fees. Those costs vary dramatically by cemetery and geography. Okay, so again, these numbers I'm giving you are not all inclusive and they are a nationwide average. So they're going to bring the lowest of the lows in, the highest of the highs, and they're going to give you somewhere in the middle there. So you really need, when you are planning, to get more information about where you are at or where you or your loved one will be buried to more specifically plan appropriately, okay? Now, I already mentioned flowers aren't included. A casket spray can easily cost several hundred dollars, depending on the size and the flowers and design. If you add standing sprays, wreaths, family arrangements, other floral pieces, you can quickly spend hundreds or even thousands on flowers alone. Now, we did not go overboard for my mom's flowers. We had very specific flowers. My mom was Polynesian, she loved tropical flowers, and her favorite flower was bird of paradise. And I can, excuse me, promise you that we probably paid premium cost for those and they have to be special ordered. So we had to order two weeks, as close to two weeks prior to the funeral as possible to make sure that they would get in in time. So we did a casket spray. Now, my mom's casket spray was mainly tropical greenery with just a few bird of paradise flowers. Now, the standing sprays on each side of her casket definitely had more elaborate flowers in them. And that was what we did as a family, okay? So two standing arrangements and the casket spray was around $1,200, $1,300 that we paid. Then you've got the obituary. Now for us, the obituary was included in the package. So you definitely wanna make sure and see if that is the case. I think a lot more places include it now because they are typically a digital obituary rather than printed in the local paper like they used to be, okay? But there can be charges if you're actually publishing an obituary, especially in a newspaper. So if you're doing that, make sure you check into what that looks like. And then there's the death certificates. Nope, they're not free, y'all. They're not free. And you need a lot of them because you need to send one to all of their accounts. If they have investment accounts, if they own a home, if they have cars that they're paying money on, bank accounts, all of the things, my mom's retirement, we've got to send one in to them. And so I think we got 15 copies of the death certificate and each one costs a few dollars. So you're gonna pay extra for those. Now, clothing. We had what my mom was gonna be buried in, but a lot of people maybe don't. You want a really nice suit or a really nice dress or camp suit for women, whatever that is, sometimes you need to purchase that, okay? So that's gonna be an additional cost. Now, if you are having a reception, we had an immediate family reception after my mom's funeral. It was not a big, huge open reception that everybody came to. And so it did save us a bit, but in all honesty, the food, even for that, immediate and immediate extended family. So the immediate family and their immediate families. But we spent probably about a thousand dollars on food for that as well. And we went simple. We went really simple sandwiches and things like that. So side salads, whatever. It was nothing crazy and fancy. So also we did it, my brother and sister-in-law's house. So if you're going out to eat in a restaurant or if you need to rent a place and then have a meal catered, it could be significantly more than we spent, okay? All of those things get added into it. But then we had airline tickets and we were buying tickets within three days of my mom passing so that we could fly on the same day that her body was transferred back to Utah. So we were buying tickets within 72 hours to travel to Utah and home. And then my son, his girlfriend, and my boyfriend came out later. So we had a couple of rounds. We had a couple of rounds of buying plane tickets. If you need hotels, rental cars, we did not in our case. But if you do, you need to plan for that. What if somebody has to take unpaid time for work? That should be rolled into the cost it takes to be able to go to the funeral and the lost wages that are gonna be experienced from that. Memorial items. If you're gonna do a table and you wanna set up certain things, we had to get some picture frames for ours. Now, a lot of it was memory and things that we all collectively had that we came together with. So there wasn't a huge expense for that for us, but for some people it could be. Programs, ours were included in the funeral package. The guest book was included in the funeral package. The big blown up photo of my mom was also included in the funeral package. So you definitely want to call the funeral home that you expect to use and get their price list to find out what is included in the lump sum funeral expense and what is not so you can plan appropriately. Video tributes. Again, for us, that was included. Memory boards. If you're gonna make memory boards, there's a cost associated with that. The funeral home is not gonna do that for you. Keepsakes that you want. We did get digital fingerprints of my moms so that we can order, you know, memory keepsakes for those of us who want them. But those keepsakes can run from 50 to $500 depending on what you're selecting, okay? Thank you cards. Those were included in our package as well. So again, getting into the detail, if you just call a local funeral home and say what's your average funeral package, they're gonna give you a number. You want to know what that number includes and what it does not include so that you can price these other items in your area that I've been talking about. Now, depending on your family, your faith, your culture, there could be additional traditions and expenses associated with honoring your loved one. My mom is Polynesian and we did do an event the week prior to her funeral that was open for close family and friends to come and visit and pay their respects at my brother's house. And part of the tradition is that everybody is sent home with a plate of food. So like one of those big styrofoam takeouts full of food and we send one for every member of the family even if they're not there. That is a significant expense. So what is that gonna look like? Are you gonna cook? Are you gonna have it catered? Whatever you're doing around that for us, that is the tradition and the custom that we put in place. And so that was a pretty significant additional expense that some of our family members stepped up and took care of which in our culture is also part of the tradition, okay? None of the things I've talked about or that you would want at your funeral or what for a loved one's funeral are wrong. Many of them in fact are incredibly meaningful but they do cost money. I think that one of the worst things that could happen is not just losing a loved one but feeling like you couldn't honor them the way that you wanted to or they deserved because of financial constraints. And it is so easy to plan for final expenses in advance. Okay, so these things are important. They are meaningful, they cost money and they often arrive during one of the most emotionally vulnerable moments of any family's life. That is 100% true. Why not plan for them? Now I'm gonna jump over because a lot of people might be saying, well, I just wanna be cremated. That's not a big deal. Okay, let's get into that because a lot of people do assume if you do cremation, it's cheap. It can be considerably less expensive, absolutely but it doesn't automatically mean inexpensive. According to the NFDA's national figures again, the median cost of a funeral with viewing and then cremation is still $6,280. And here's what that would include. Basic funeral director staff and services, again,$24.95, transfer remains $3.95 and balming $8.45 because you have to still be embalmed before you are created. Other preparation, $295 again, that's gonna be dressing, doing the hair, the makeup, whatever the case may be so that your loved one can be seen and look great at their viewing. So that still exists. The viewing is gonna be $475. The funeral ceremony still happens, $550. A service vehicle, $175, printed memorial package,$195, cremation fee, $400. So yes, the cremation fee can be significantly less but an alternative cremation container, $160. Okay, so that could have taken off the $4,800,$4,900, whatever we paid for moms. And of course these numbers I'm giving are like the flat fee. It's not the taxes and whatever else goes along with that. Then you've got an earn depending on what you pick but on average, they're about $295. So all of those numbers still total $6,280, y'all. Now there are times people don't want the viewing. They don't want the funeral. I just wanna be cremated. I want the family to come together and spread my ashes in ABC Place. Okay, well, what if that is across the country or in another country or on the top of a mountain? There's still the cost of getting everybody there that wants to be there or is requested to be there. So you still gotta think about the travel and things like that to run into it. Here we're talking about cremation with the traditional viewing and ceremony. Now, direct cremation can be less expensive. Like I was just saying, but it's still gonna add up to, I mean, median direct cremation is usually gonna run you between $2,600 and $2,800. And that's if a funeral home provides it, okay? So when someone says cremation costs extra, you need to ask what kind of cremation is it? Are we talking about direct cremation? Cremation plus a memorial, a viewing followed by the cremation? Are the ashes being buried? Are they being placed in a columbarium? Are you purchasing an urn? Are you holding a celebration of life? Because all of those choices affect the final number. Are there still gonna be flowers involved, programs involved, an obituary involved, okay? It is important to go through all of these details. I knew that the average funeral would probably cost between 10 and 15,000. But again, I wasn't factoring in the travel. I wasn't factoring in the cost of a sealed vault. I wasn't factoring in a lot of the food and things like that that went along with the different things that we did. And I do this for a living. I am a well strategist. And so I've always said, you know, 10 to $15,000. Again, you need to look at the details because we spent more than 10 grand above and beyond the $15,000 number. And we did not go overboard for mom. I thought we went not simple, but I thought we went pretty average on the things that we put in place and things that we did. You know, I don't feel like we missed anything. I don't feel like we went cheap on anything, but I also feel like we didn't go over the top on anything as well. Now, I wanna dive in. I've been talking about realities of other numbers, but let's kind of talk about when I researched this topic in general, some of the numbers that came up, okay? So real numbers, this is the part I want you guys to understand. And that's why I'm going to go through these numbers again from my research to really talk about what I want you to understand. The question should not simply be what does a funeral cost? The question should be how much family or how much money will my family need when I die? Because here's the thing, even those ancillary expenses I've already been talking about, that's just to get through that day, that event of putting to rest a loved one, okay? We talked about headstone, flowers, food, travel, time away from work, outstanding medical expense. I haven't seen any of the numbers on that one yet, household bills that need to be taken care of, credit cards. Maybe a mortgage payment still needs to be made. Maybe your spouse relied on Social Security or pension income, and that goes away. Maybe somebody needs enough cash to simply breathe for a few months while everything gets sorted out. So what is that number? If you're losing an income, even if it's a retirement income, what is that number? I don't believe final expense planning should begin with what's the cheapest policy I can buy? It should begin with what will the people I love actually need and want? So let me give you an example of me personally. I have a final expense policy. It is a $50,000 policy because I want any food involved, any travel involved, and maybe even a few thousand dollars left out of that for whatever. If there's extras, if between now and when I pass what's traditional and the norm shifts or changes, I don't want my son to have to worry about coming up with that money. So $50,000 is my final expense policy only. Now, here's the other thing about final expense policies. I want y'all to understand a life insurance policy that is designed as a final expense is important. You may say, I have life insurance. Why isn't that good enough? Well, because life insurance doesn't pay out until your family gets a death certificate. We got my mom's death certificates two and a half weeks after she passed. Then if you have to wait for all that paperwork to get to you to fill out, to process, you're talking probably another, if you're lucky, 30 days, most likely 60 days. You can't sit, I mean, I guess maybe you could. I would imagine there's a fee for that if you need to hold somebody's body for an extended period of time, or your family has to look at how to raise that money within days of losing you. The absolute last thing a family would ever want to have to do, okay? So what will the people you love actually need when you're gone? Or what would your loved ones actually want that you need to be prepared for financially? One of the other parts that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet, grief makes decisions harder. You're sitting across from somebody, choosing a casket, choosing flowers, choosing an urn, choosing a burial plot, choosing what mom or dad is going to wear. And every decision feels significant while simultaneously overwhelming. And it's significant and overwhelming because it's one of the last things you're ever gonna do for that person. So imagine making those decisions while simultaneously thinking, how am I gonna pay for this? That's the burden I want families to avoid. Now, there were unexpected expenses for us, but we didn't have to worry about how we paid for it. We knew we had the money set aside. We just didn't realize some of the things that weren't gonna be included in the funeral and everything worked out fine. We were blessed to have the means to do everything the way that we wanted to do for mom and encompass all of the things she said she wanted, okay? Caregivers and family members are already caring enough. That's why I want you to avoid this burden. When you lose a loved one, there's enough weight on your shoulders. There is enough heartache in your heart. I don't want the families that I talk to, I don't want the people who listen to my podcast to ever be in a situation of worrying about finances as well. Now, I mentioned I had a$50,000 final expense policy. I pay less than $50 a month for that. And on top of that, to cover lost wages, if my son, my future daughter-in-law, my grandkids, a spouse, needs to take time off work or wants to take time off work for six months or a year to adjust, to handle all my affairs, to just figure things out, I've got several hundred thousand dollars in a life insurance policy as well, right? So that's part of the $50,000. I estimate we'll cover my funeral. I would imagine I'd probably have some cash in the bank and stuff like that too to fill in any gaps if they're a little bit more than that was needed. But the idea is that money also helps them get through that first couple months and tell my life insurance and my other investment accounts pay out to my family members. And then that's the inheritance, that's the legacy I leave behind, built inside my trust to do many different things in my case. But one is to allow for my family to take the time they need to grieve and to reset and to figure out what comes next. Your loved ones should not have to open a credit card, start a GoFundMe or borrow from relatives and even drain their own retirement or emergency savings account to bury somebody they love. For less than $50 a month, my son will never have to do that. So what does final expense planning really mean? It isn't about the debt. It's about the people who are still here. It is saying, I know this day is coming eventually. And I don't want you worrying about money when it does. Maybe that is life insurance. A final expense plan is a life insurance plan. But when I pass, my son will make one phone call and within 48 hours, that $50,000 will be in his account and all of the arrangements, I had picked my casket, I had picked my flowers, I have done all of that. So he doesn't even have to think about those things. It is all saved in my file with that insurance company where they actually will make the phone call to the mortuary. They will let them know all the things I want. And then again, that money can be transferred to my son to pay for it. It can also be set up where it goes directly to the funeral home if you want to do that. So maybe what you have is life insurance. Maybe it's a dedicated savings account. Maybe it's prepaid funeral arrangements. Maybe it's a combination of strategies, but there should be a strategy. After my mom's funeral, the following week before my dad and I came back to Texas, we went back to the funeral home and we set up all the things for my dad, except flowers. We set up everything, the casket, the vault, all of the other things that we did for mom, except flowers, because those are done at an outside place. And we put together a prepayment plan. So for everything my dad wants and we want for him, for a couple of years we're paying, I don't know what it is, about 300 bucks a month. Now, of course, if he passes before then we'll have to make up the gap in what hasn't been paid, but we're taking the approach of prepaying all of those things so that when that time comes, there's even less for my brother and I have to think about than we had to think about for mom. Okay? I wanna encourage you guys to ask yourself these five questions. Number one, do my family members know whether I want to burial cremation? Y'all, this one is so important. My son's dad, my ex-husband passed away earlier this year. He and I have not been married for about 19 years. And my son called and said, mom, do you know if dad wanted to be buried or cremated? And my answer was, I don't remember if we formally had that conversation, but I would think he would want this. And I shared that with my son. And think about that. We hadn't been married for 19 years. And I was the one that got a phone call asking, do I know what he wanted? Now we still had interactions. We still had a relationship. We were in a good place. Even though our son was an adult, we still communicated. But I didn't definitively. I was pretty sure, but I didn't definitively know. Make sure your left one knows which one you want. Do they know what kind of service you want? If you even want to service, my mom was very clear on what she did and didn't want. And in my mom's culture, there is a lot more typically done than we did, but we didn't do it because our mom didn't want it. And I can promise you that upset some people and that's okay. They can talk to my mom when they get to heaven. We honored my mom's wishes, but different cultures expect and do different things. And it's not that those things are bad, but they are going to cost money. And based on that, question three is, have I estimated the total cost, not just the funeral home cost? Number four, where will the money come from? And number five, can my family access that money immediately when it's needed? Having assets somewhere and having cash available at the moment your family needs it are not the same thing. As a wealth strategist, it takes time to get money out of investments, even when somebody passes, if it is not a plan that is specifically designed like a final expense plan to pay almost immediately. The next thing I want to talk about y'all is make sure your family has a red folder. If you have not listened to my episode about the red folder, go back, I did not look at it before this. I apologize, I should have. But earlier this year, I did an episode about the red folder. It is the folder that is going to contain all of the information, all of the important information, your wishes, life insurance information, beneficiary information, the executor of the trust, the agent on any life insurance policies or investment accounts, will and trust documents, financial accounts, important contacts, funeral or cremation preferences, military discharge paperwork if applicable, that is for my dad and I have that binder, cemetery information, instructions about who needs to be called. That is so vital you guys, I can promise you there are people I missed calling for my mom. Part of it is we move my parents out of their house four years prior and the one thing I wasn't thinking about then is hey, dig around and all their papers and their phone books or maybe hang on to that phone book that's in that drawer because they might need people in there that you need to call in the future. I didn't do that. And my dad's phone had a handful of numbers in it of the people that they still frequently talk to. Beyond that, I was lucky that social media exists and I was able to find a lot of people, but still heartbreaking that there were people I thought of after or who came because they saw it on social media or heard it from another family member or friend and I wished they would have heard it from me. You're not gonna get everything perfect and I'm not beating myself up about it and just letting you know there were people who popped into my mind and I'm like, oh my gosh, I should have called them. I'm so grateful they got the information and came but I should have called them, okay? Don't make your loved ones search through the drawers wondering whether you have a life insurance policy. Don't make your grieving children become detectives. Don't make them guess whether mom wanted to be buried or cremated. Have the conversation while you can have the conversation. It's not the funnest conversation, but I promise you, it's a relief when it's done because you have it and you don't have to have it in the future. Anything else you're gonna talk about in regards to that is simply, I mean, maybe if somebody gets married or somebody gets divorced or there's extra grandkids that are born along the way or there's extra properties or investments that are put in place, you may have to have little conversations but you can have the big hard one. So those small ones are really easy to get through. It's not the easiest, but being on the other side of it, I believe even more strongly in having it. If you listen to my episodes from the last year, you will hear me tell you how important it is. Having just walked through this in the last six weeks with my family, my conviction over the importance of it and in the work that I do is hundreds times fold than it was prior. I don't even know if that was a clear sentence, but it's a hundred fold at least of what it was before and it wasn't too rough for us, but there were things that I would have been more prepared for. There are things I am now more prepared for for my dad. When someone we love dies, we can't remove the grief. We can't fix that. Money can never replace the grief, never replace the heartache, okay? Life insurance can't fix that. A financial plan can't fix that, but preparation can save a layer of burden from being added to it. It can allow a daughter to be a daughter, a son to be a son, a spouse to grieve their spouse, a caregiver to finally exhale. Instead of wondering, how are we gonna pay for all of this? Instead of wondering, how are we gonna pay for all of this? They can make a couple necessary phone calls and have the wheels in motion. Because you were prepared, because you made sure they had all the information and because you took the time to plan for what you wanted. This is why I do what I do. If you're listening today and you don't know whether your family is financially prepared for your final expenses or for their final expenses, feel free to reach out to me and let's have a conversation. You can find me at Natalie McPhee-Kheim on Instagram. You can respond in the show notes on this episode. But please reach out. Let's have a conversation. If you need support and help navigating that conversation, I would be happy to plug in and help you with that or just framework it on paper so that you can do it more all inclusively and not fumble around. And it does not cost you anything to meet with me and talk about what it is that you need, the topics you need to discuss, and then go from there in your planning. I will take the time to look at what you already have. We'll talk about what you want or your loved ones want. We'll estimate your family's actually need. And when there is a gap, we will talk about options to fill that gap. Because the goal is not to leave your family a bill. The goal is to leave them a plan, to leave them peace of mind and a little bit less of the heaviness and burden, the financial stress during the loss that a loved one can create. I wanna thank you guys for being here as always. I hope this episode gave you some important information. Again, if you'd like to have a deeper conversation about it, please reach out to me. We'll set up a time. Let's just talk. Let's talk about what your need might be and what solutions there might be for that need. Until next time, this is Natalie with Chat with Nat, conversations that count. And I'm grateful you took the time to spend with me learning a little bit more about what we all are gonna need when our time comes. Have the conversations today that your family will be grateful you had tomorrow.