When John Taplin of Open Prepaid Funeral Plans first proposed that we work together to create a GFG funeral plan I told him to f*** off.
Not in so many words. I was icily polite. I was practised in the art having previously spurned the seductive sweet talk of another funeral plan pedlar which wanted to fly me to Scotland and show me how shiningly ethical it is. In their case I explained (courteously) that I failed to see how it could be a good deal for the consumer to lavish hospitality and double-jointed accountancy on an innumerate dingbat like me.
John persisted. What did we want a funeral plan to look like? I fired impossible specifications at him and hissed “See what I mean? Can’t be done, cannit?”
And he replied, “Oh I think it can.”
So (finally) we met and the rest is, as they say, the present and the future. We showed our freshly-minted prepaid plan to a fifth-generation funeral director of impeccable credentials and all the risk aversion you could ask for. He mulled and he mused and finally he spoke: “With this plan I get to charge every funeral at the full at-need price.” I’d been blind to that because John and I had focussed exclusively on the interests of the consumer. But you can see why our heritage FD liked what he saw when you consider this from Golden Charter’s Ts and Cs:
“Upon completion of the Beneficiary’s funeral arrangements the Selected Funeral Director will be entitled to payment from us … The Selected Funeral Director will have no recourse against us or the Trust in the event that the sum so intimated by us is lower than the relevant parts of the original Funeral Plan cost”
Yes, what an absolutely crap deal for consumers. I pay for a £3500 funeral and get one costing hundreds of pounds less — a bit like finding myself in a 2 star hotel when I’d paid for 4.
And yes, what John and I had created is a thing of unparalleled and luminous beauty which is also very badly needed. We call it GFGPlan.
Your conventional prepaid funeral plan is beginning to look as dated as the mullet. Imagine a restaurant that serves only fixed 3-course meals cooked to recipes first published in Woman’s Own in 1958; that’s what you get with a conventional funeral plan.
Today’s funeral buyer wants cafeteria service – a bit of this, some of that, no limousine thanks.
Today’s funeral director doesn’t want to have to shoulder the risk of its plan provider finding itself a bit short.
The beauty of GFGPlan is its simplicity. It’s a pot. Into which you put money. As and when. It grows at 4% pa. None of the money is spent on salaries, commissions or freebies for noisy bloggers. It empowers the consumer to buy what they want and no more than they want. It pays a proper price to funeral directors.
Is it risk-free? If there was a total global financial meltdown, no. But if every GFGPlan-holder died today, the trust fund would be able to cover every single one of them. Can any other prepaid plan provider can say that?
If you’ve not yet studied GFGPlan, we strongly recommend that you do so. Start here.