What is your Cheapest Option?
What is your cheapest option? This is a question I hear frequently and unfortunately, there is not a straight-forward answer.
When I’m in a sales appointment, I always begin at the end: what kind of grave marker do you want to visit? There are upright markers, flat markers, granite shutters, bronze niche plaques, and other options.
At St. Mary’s Cemetery in East Moline, we have graves for traditional full casket burials in flat-marker only sections as well as in sections designated for upright markers. We have lawn crypts, which is a pre-buried double depth vault that get either a flat bronze or flat granite marker. We have niches for urns that get a 3” x 6” bronze plaque. We have an area designated for urn burial that gets flat markers (purchased by you independent from the cemetery). We also have mausoleum buildings with crypts that can hold just one casket, two caskets, and crypts that can hold up to four caskets. The mausoleum crypts get sent out for shutter engraving with Moline Monument (separate expense from the cemetery).
If you explore our price sheet, you will find the costs associated with the various types of spaces. With every type of interment (full casket burial, urn burial, inurnment, crypt entombment, etc.) there are costs also associated with each specific type and location.
When you are looking at overall cost, you need to look at every company you are working with. Not only are there costs associated with the cemetery, but you have funeral home expenses and possibly monument company expenses. For example: you may purchase a grave for urn burial ($650.00) with interment fees currently at $700.00 for a total of $1,350.00. You may be thinking this is cheaper than a columbarium niche because our niches are $1,900.00 each with an interment fee of $400.00 for a total of $2,300.00 (bronze plaque included). If you neglected to factor in the cost of your grave marker, you could easily spend more money on what you thought was the “cheaper” option.
Another example: some people see the cost of our mausoleum crypts and go wide eyed and pale. What they fail to see is that with a crypt purchase, the interment fees are less, you don’t need to pay for a vault, and shutter engraving could be less expensive than even a relatively basic flat marker.
Now for the short answer to the original question, what is your cheapest option? The cheapest option is to have permission from whoever has the rights to a space here to have an urn entombed with them or buried on top of their vault. This would leave you with only the interment fees of either $500.00 in a crypt or $700.00 in the ground. If you do not do any kind of grave marker then that’s it for cemetery expenses.
I hope this was helpful and gives you some things to think about when planning.
Prices referenced above were from the current price sheet at the time this was written
-Dustin Sommers, Manager