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The Bottom Line

How much does an average burial cost?

Most Commonly Selected Services in the US and their Average Cost:

• Professional Charges $1,182.31
• Embalming $400.51
• Other preparations* $150.35
• Visitation/viewing $314.42
• Funeral at funeral home $356.68
• Funeral Home transfering $158.66
• Hearse (local) $179.08
• Service car/van $87.42
• Acknowledgement cards $14.47
• Casket $2,176.46
• Vault $757.80
• Total $5,778.16 *(cosmetology, etc.)

Here are some additional expenses: Cemetery plot: $500 to several thousand. Opening and closing the grave: $350 to $1,500, depending on the time and day of the week. Headstones, statues, or markers: $500 to several thousand.

These numbers were taken from: http://www.nfda.org/

All of this money is being spent to dispose respectfully of a corpse, which is another way of saying, to comfort the bereaved. The money spent does not benefit the dead, though it may buy a ritual that gives the living some succor (assuming it didn't damage their finances too much). However, it is cheaper than cryonics. Compared to cryo-preservation these costs are one fifth of the cheapest suspension price offered by The Cryonics Institute (at approx. $30,000). This is assuming that there are none of the additional costs cited above which could make a funeral cost an entire half of the cheapest suspension price.

But what happens when you take life insurance into account? The average American household has $94,600 in life insurance. (Figure from 2002, LIMRA Market Trends, LIMRA International, Inc.). Of course, a person or a family's particular circumstances will determine whether they believe cryo-suspension to be affordable or not in the event of death and insurance collection. However, people are often willing to pay $30,000 or more for a car, so cryonics is also something people could generally afford, so long as they were convinced of its usefulness. It is unfortunate that most people are not willing to consider the possibilities cryonics has to offer; if they were, the cost of cryonics would come down, making the practice more widely available and acceptable.

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