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Estate Matters: Selling Real Estate

After cremation services in Monticello, FL, the executor of the deceased person’s estate is responsible for handling all the matters of the estate. One of these matters may include selling the deceased person’s home and distributing the proceeds from the sale among the beneficiaries of the estate.

Your loved one may have already spelled out their wishes for any real estate they own (including their personal home) after they die. They may have decided to leave their personal home to one of the beneficiaries of their estate. Or they may have specified that their personal home be sold and the proceeds distributed equally among the beneficiaries or given to a specific beneficiary.

What ultimately will be done with your loved one’s house will depend on whether it is paid for, has a mortgage, or has a reverse mortgage. These scenarios may override your loved one’s stated wishes for what they want done with their personal home.

If the house was owned outright by your loved one, and they wanted it to go to a specific beneficiary, then this will be easiest for you. The beneficiary gets the house (it will be titled to them), and they can keep it or sell it.

However, if the house has a mortgage on it, then the beneficiary will need to get a new mortgage in their name to take ownership of the house. If the beneficiary is unable or unwilling to do this, then the house can be sold to pay the mortgage off. Any money remaining after the payoff of the mortgage will go to the designated beneficiary.

If the house has a reverse mortgage on it, then it is the property of the bank after your loved one dies, and the beneficiary (or beneficiaries) get nothing.

Your loved one may have specified that their personal home be sold and the money from the sale split between the beneficiaries. If the house is paid for, this will be a simple matter of selling the house and splitting the money from the sale.

However, if the house has a mortgage, then you must pay off the mortgage before any of the proceeds can be distributed to the beneficiaries.

If you will be selling your loved one’s house as part of your role of the executor of the estate, you should contact a real estate professional as soon as possible after your loved one dies. A real estate professional can give you insights about comparable home prices in the area and they can make suggestions about repairs or upgrades that you need to make that will make the home more likely to sell.

If you are selling your loved one’s personal home as the executor of an estate, you should have the house appraised by a professional appraiser. The appraisal value listed on tax documents does not usually reflect the actual value of the personal home and property.

A professional appraiser can provide you with the actual value of your loved one’s home and its property. You should share this information with the beneficiaries. You also now have a selling price that you can approach a real estate agent with.

If the proceeds of your loved one’s personal home are to be split among all the beneficiaries, and one beneficiary wants to buy the house, you cannot let that beneficiary buy the house at a price that’s lower than its market value.

This is unfair to the rest of the beneficiaries. A good practice is to use the appraiser’s estate of the home’s value as a starting point to talk with all the beneficiaries about what price they would agree on to let one beneficiary buy the home.

For information about cremation services in Monticello, FL, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you.

Graveside Services

Some funerals at funeral homes in Monticello, FL will have a funeral service and a graveside service, while other funerals may have just a graveside service. Either type of funeral is acceptable, but people tend to have more experience with attending funeral services (which are usually held in the evening hours) than with attending graveside services (which are often held during the day).

Because people are more likely to attend funeral services than they are to attend graveside services, you may not know exactly what to expect at a graveside service.

A graveside service happens in the cemetery at the plot where the deceased person will be buried. This service is often very religious in tenor, but it is also much shorter than a funeral service or memorial service. This is because the graveside service’s purpose is to commit the de deceased person’s remains to the ground.

A graveside service is usually a much more intimate type of service than the funeral service because there are few people who attend it. A graveside service may also be a much more emotional service than the funeral service because it’s the family’s final farewell to their loved one.

While some families choose to have private graveside services, most graveside services are public, which means that anyone who would like to attend the graveside service can attend it.

Graveside services start at the funeral home. After the funeral service (or the morning after a nighttime funeral service), drivers who will be going to the graveside service get their vehicles in line for the funeral procession that will make its way from the funeral home to the cemetery.

The hearse will be the lead car in the funeral procession. The funeral procession will slowly take the deceased person to their place of final rest. If the cemetery is located next to the funeral chapel, then the mourners will slowly follow the family out to the burial plot.

A graveside service can be held for both the burial of a casket and for the interment of cremated remains (whether in a columbarium niche, a mausoleum, or in a cemetery plot). A clergy member will usually offer a prayer for the deceased person and a prayer for the family before the deceased person is interred.

Most cemeteries will wait until the deceased’s family has left the cemetery before they lower the casket into the burial plot, since the interment can be very difficult for the family to watch.

At a graveside service, the family of the deceased person always sits immediately in front of the casket. The funeral home will have chairs set up under a canopy, so once the deceased’s family is seated, other people can sit in the chairs behind them until they are full. Anyone else will stand during the graveside service.

Knowing what you should say to a bereaved family after a graveside service might be hard. Sometimes the family is allowed to leave the cemetery first, especially if there’s no reception planned, so you may not have a chance to speak with them at the graveside service.

But if there is a reception, express your condolences to the family before you leave the cemetery. Leave the cemetery in a dignified manner. Don’t arrive at the graveside service nor leave it with your music blaring and your bass thumping. If you do listen to the radio on the way to the cemetery, be sure to turn it off before you get to the cemetery.

If you want to know more about graveside services at funeral homes in Monticello, FL, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help.

Documents Your Heirs Will Need

Obtaining death certificates is one of the cremation services provided in Havana, FL after you die. However, there are several documents that you need to prepare now – before you die – so that your loved ones have the easiest time possible taking care of everything after you die.

One document that you need to prepare now is a will or a revocable trust. These legal instruments enable you to designate someone to oversee your affairs after your death and they let you distribute assets and property to whomever you wish.

If you don’t have a will or revocable trust, your estate will go into probate. What this means is that your family will not have access to any assets (unless they are a joint owner or joint signer) until a court determines the value of your estate (assets minus debts) and arbitrarily distributes them according to the next-of-kin laws in Florida. This process can take up to a year or more to be completed.

What this means in practical terms is that your family’s life is in limbo for that period of time. They will not have access to any financial assets that are solely in your name, so they will be unable to use them to pay debts and support themselves. Additionally, they will not be able to make any decisions about property, businesses, etc. that you are the sole owner of.

This can put your family in financial jeopardy and it can put your financial and physical assets that you have spent a lifetime accruing at risk as well.

It is advisable to include a letter of explanation with your will or revocable trust to explain your rationale for how your assets are distributed. If you will be splitting your estate unevenly among your immediate family members, you should talk with them now about why you have decided to do that to ward off hard feelings that are likely to surface when it is revealed after your death.

Another document that your heirs will need is a list of all your financial accounts and the names of the beneficiaries on those accounts. This will include bank accounts, retirement accounts, and investment accounts. You can assign a beneficiary or name someone to whom the account should be transferred when you die (known as a transfer on death, or TOD, provision) to these accounts now.

It’s important to remember that the beneficiaries on these accounts will supercede any beneficiaries named in your will or revocable trust, so you need to make sure to keep your beneficiaries current.

If, for example, you named an ex-spouse as the beneficiary on an account, but named your current spouse in your will or revocable trust, the ex-spouse, not your current spouse, will get whatever is in the account.

A personal inventory is another document your heirs will need when you die. While your will or revocable trust will usually tend to distribute your personal possessions in broad strokes (using words like “all” and “everything”), a personal inventory will let you make sure that everything you own is accounted for. Don’t forget about personal possessions that may be stored somewhere else that your heirs may not even know about.

Be sure that you have life insurance policies, real estate records, tax returns, and digital account information stored with your will or revocable trust, your list of financial accounts, and your personal inventory. By keeping all your important papers in a single place, your heirs will have access to everything you want them to have after you die.

For more information about cremation services in Havana, FL, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you.

Benefits of Prepaid Funerals

You may be thinking about funerals at funeral homes in Havana, FL because you want to make sure you have everything your family needs to take care of things – including your funeral – when you die. If you’re not thinking about your funeral, no matter what your age, you should be.

You are going to die. That’s a certainty. Whether you’re prepared to die (and that means making sure your family is taken care of and they know what your funeral plans are) is not certain. Many Americans put off planning for their deaths because dying is uncomfortable to think about.

However, without proper planning, your death can cause a lot of unnecessary stress and strain on your family on top of the unavoidable stress and strain of losing you and grieving over that loss.

Having a prepaid funeral plan is one of the ways you can eliminate additional stress for your family when you die. Although it may seem like a significant amount of money to spend now for something that, if you’re younger, may be many years away, you should look at prepaid funeral plans the way you look at any other investment.

By having a prepaid funeral plan, you can be sure that your funeral costs are taken care of, without having to worry that your family will have to find a way to pay them after you die. All they will need to do is take your clothes to the funeral home, confirm your funeral arrangements (which is part of prepaying for a funeral) with the funeral director and pay for the funeral in full.

A prepaid funeral plan takes care of every detail of a funeral. This includes the selection of a casket and selection of a cemetery and a burial plot. It’s important to know that if you are an active military member or a military veteran, you are entitled to several funeral benefits.

One of these funeral benefits is free burial with a grave marker in a national cemetery. Your spouse and your dependent children are also eligible for free burial with you when they die (whether they die before you or after you). Even if you choose to be cremated, your cremation remains can be inurned in a national cemetery.

Prepaid funeral plans also include detailed instructions on the type of funeral service you want to have. You should anticipate that some of the people you might choose now to participate in your funeral service will be unavailable (either because they are too far away or because they have died) when your funeral takes place, so don’t get too specific about participants.

There are many ways to finance a prepaid funeral.

One of these is to purchase burial insurance. Burial insurance typically has lower payout amounts than life insurance (payouts are usually capped at $25,000), but they also have lower premiums and do not require a medical exam before purchase.

Another way to finance a prepaid funeral is to set up a joint account with a loved one that is specifically to be used for paying for funeral expenses. The loved one who survives you when you die will be able to use the money in the account to pay for your funeral.

A third way to finance a prepaid funeral is to set up a Payable on Death account through your bank. With this kind of account, you will a name a beneficiary who will have access to the money in the account to pay for your funeral expenses.

If you want to know more about planning funerals at funeral homes in Havana, FL, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help.

COVID-19 Reopening: Safest Activities

We don’t want you to use our cremation services in Quincy, FL any sooner than you have to, so here are some guidelines about the safest activities you can engage in during COVID-19 reopening. These guidelines are based on these factors:

Everyone is wearing a facemask;
Social distancing is being practiced;
Local infection rates are no higher than moderate;
COVID-19 testing is readily available and is being done.

The safest conditions in a reopening phase are when cases of COVID-19 or 5% or lower.

In general, outdoor activities are safer than indoor activities. Additionally, short-duration activities are safer than long-duration activities. Any activity that doesn’t include large crowds of people is safer than activities that take place with a lot of people present.

You should have what the experts call an exposure budget. What this means is that you do not immediately return to doing all the usual things that you did before the pandemic began. Try to space activities out as much as possible to limit the possibility that you can be exposed to the virus.

It’s important to note that any activity can be more or less safe depending on whether facemasks are being worn, social distancing is being practiced, and proper handwashing is being practiced by all the participants.

Epidemiologists who are researching this have created an activity score from 1, with one representing the lowest risk, to 10, with 10 representing the highest risk.

The most risky activities (listed from highest to lowest and between 7 and 10 on the scale) include:

Attending events with large gatherings, including political events, social events, and sporting events (if people are allowed to be present);

Going to crowded beaches;
Going to bars;
Going to airports and traveling by planes;
Going to amusement parks;
Going to gyms;
Going to houses of worship;
Playing sports where people are in close contact (basketball is highest);
Going to public pools;
Going to casinos;
Going to barbershops or hair salons;
Going to theaters.

Activities with a moderate risk (listed from highest to lowest and between 3 and 5 on the scale) include:

Attending a dinner party;
Eating inside a restaurant;
Staying at hotels;
Bowling with masks and social distancing;
Going to museums and libraries;
Eating outdoors at a restaurant;
Going to work in an office;
Going to crowded indoor shopping areas.

Activities with the least amount of risk (listed from highest to lowest and between 1 and 2 on the scale) include:

Going camping using your own tent, camper, or recreational vehicle;
Getting groceries;
Getting takeout food or having food delivered to your home;
Golfing;
Going to a medical office;
Playing tennis;
Walking, running, or biking outdoors;
Filling your vehicle with gas.

Attending events with large gatherings is ranked 10, which makes it the riskiest activity that you can engage in during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Going to bars has an activity risk of 9. There are several reasons why this activity can be so risky.

One reason is because bars are naturally very crowded and people are very close together by design (to socialize). The other reason is because alcohol lowers inhibitions. So, although people may come in wearing masks and trying to do all the right things, after they’ve had a few drinks the masks and other safety measures go out the window.

For your safety and for the safety of your family and other people you are around on a regular basis, you should avoid any high risk activity during COVID-19. Your life may depend on it. Even if you get COVID-19 and have mild or no symptoms, you are exposing everyone around you to potentially much more serious symptoms and even death.

For information about cremation services in Quincy, FL, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you.