34. Funeral Planning: Unlocking Peace of Mind with our Partners Golden Charter

Join us as we partner with Golden Charter, industry leaders in providing peace of mind through their comprehensive funeral planning services. Our expert guest Carly Ross share invaluable insights. Tune in to discover how proactive planning can unlock a sense of security and peace of mind for the future. 

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Instagram – @liftingthelidfuneralpodcast
Email – Liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk
Website – www.gseller.co.uk/podcast
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Transcript

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Hi, I'm Andy Eeley, Senior Funeral Director for G. Seller Independent Funeral Directors, and we've been serving bereaved families since 1910. I'm sure you're all well aware there's lots of different myths, taboos, and misconceptions around what happens behind the scenes within the funeral profession. So we decided to put together this series of podcasts to answer those questions and hopefully dispel those myths. So please do like, share, and subscribe, and send those questions. Send them to liftingthelid@gseller. co. uk, and we will do our absolute best to answer them for you. It genuinely is our family caring for your family. We'd like to pause and take a moment to mention our partner for this podcast, Golden Charter. This podcast contains promotional messages about funeral planning. G. Seller & Company Limited is an appointed representative of Golden Charter Limited, trading as Golden Charter Funeral Plans, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We know it's never easy to think about death, but there are several good reasons why having a funeral plan makes perfect sense. From an emotional, practical, and financial point of view, planning your funeral in advance is a chance to take control, feel prepared, and get peace of mind for you and the ones you care about. We work in partnership with Golden Charter, one of the UK's largest funeral plan providers who have over 30 years experience and have helped over 900,000 people plan ahead for their funeral. Working together, G. Seller and Golden Charter can offer you the personal service and support when it matters most and the reassurance and the security of a leading funeral plan provider. Welcome to the latest episode of Lifting the Lid. Today, we have our partner in funeral plans, Carly Ross from Golden Charter. Welcome, Carly. Thank you for making the journey. Quite a journey this morning, I understand. It was a bit of an early start, but thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. It's great to see you. And of course, we all know Joseph. Now, to illustrate the strong relationship that we have between Golden Charter and us as G. Seller. This is why we have Joseph here to just cement that. Carly, Funeral Plans. What is a funeral plan? Talk us through the basics of a funeral plan. A funeral plan is basically a simple way of making financial provision for your funeral in advance and also setting out the arrangements, so what you would like to have included. You can choose the service that you would like, the funeral director that you would like to use. I think a funeral plan is really about peace of mind, to be honest. It's about reassurance for you and also your family members that these questions have been thought through in advance and taken care of. I think another reason people consider funeral plans is because of the protection against rising costs. Rising costs, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so you may be aware there's an annual report that comes out, Cost of Dying Report, and it shows that like most things, funeral costs are increasing over time. So with a funeral plan, what you're doing is you're able to secure your funeral director services costs at today's prices, so it's giving you some protection against rising costs. Brilliant. Funeral planning, the general financial planning, what are the benefits of doing that? You've touched on them loosely there. Can you just elaborate a little bit on that for us? I think it's interesting to possibly consider funeral planning like other forms of financial planning more widely. We talk about we make provision for our pensions from the earliest point of which we're in the workforce, but funeral planning is not quite regarded in the same way. I think it's interesting to consider it in that way in terms of benefits, I suppose a funeral plan is a little bit... It's other forms of later life planning. You're maybe setting aside a sum of money or you're ensuring a sum of money. But with a funeral plan, I suppose you're going a little bit further. You are actually setting out your wishes rather than just making financial provision. Okay. Golden Charter, do you work with independent corporate entities? Just tell us a little bit, if possible, just about who you work with. About Golden Charter? Yeah. We work with the largest network of independent funeral directors like yourselves. Exclusive, okay. So family-run businesses who work with us to offer our plans on our behalf. Perfect. What happens? I mean, this is one of the big, big questions. What happens to the money when a family prepays funeral? Customer payments are held within the Golden Charter Trust. That's a separate legal entity to Golden Charter. It has almost 1. 2 billion under management, and it's managed by a board of independent trustees. It's basically their job to hold on to that money and protect it and ensure that it's there to pay for the funeral however far into the future that may be. Customer payments are also covered by the financial services compensation scheme. As you will be aware, funeral planning was recently regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. I think offering increased protections and reassurance that customers' monies are protected. I'm going to actually pitch a question to Joseph now as well. His experiences with us as a company, as G. Seller, working as an appointed representative. What is that experience from our perspective? We at G. Seller, work with Golden Charter since they were established about 30 years ago. The journey's changed over time as the needs of funeral plans and families has changed. But I think the reason why we've always chosen to work with Golden Charter is, number one, they only work with independent family funeral directors like ourselves. Number two, they provide an appointed business manager so they can go through things that they're solely focused on funeral plans. And obviously at G. Seller, we're not just doing funeral plans, we're doing at-need Funerals, bereavement support and memorials. So it's important that we've got a partner that we can rely on and they can bring information into us that we wouldn't necessarily know ourselves. Also, the trust fund that we've already touched on, it's over-funded. And so if everyone that's got a funeral plan with Golden Charter passes away at the same time, that's not going to happen, but if it did, there's still money left over. And I think that's a really powerful thing to be able to tell families, because not every trust fund is necessarily like that. And that's exactly what you were saying about where the funds go. They're not actually with Golden Charter. So I think it's important to say that Golden Charter is a separate company to G. Seller, but we work in partnership together. And the trust fund is separate from Golden Charter as well. So Funeral plans, they're not like life insurance. We've touched on it briefly. Can we go in a bit more detail as to what the differences are? Yeah, sure. A funeral plan is prepayment of a service. So unlike life insurance, I suppose, where there's money there, you're going that one step further with a funeral plan. You're actually documenting and arranging your funeral wishes. I think it was really brought to life for me recently. I was visiting one of our other funeral director partners, and I was able to see the difference, I think, between a customer or family that that funeral director was supporting who had recently suffered a bereavement and understanding the complexity of everything that you need to take that family through, all the questions that you need to ask them, versus when a funeral plan was in place. And the funeral director explained it to me as he was able to say to the family member, "Look, Mum actually had a funeral plan in place. Really what the conversation today about is crossing the T's, dotting the I's, because actually all these questions have already been gone through." I think for me, seeing that in reality really brought it home to me, I think, about what that additional step is involved in a funeral plan versus perhaps some other form of leaving money. I think that's really powerful because to have no uncertainty about final wishes, like you know as a funeral director as well, like myself. It's really, really important that the next of kin or say, for example, someone passed away and they've got two or three children, all those children might not necessarily agree on what they think their loved ones wishes would be. So to be able to take away any element of doubt of exactly what their loved ones wishes are is really powerful. And it puts people at ease knowing that everything they're doing is literally to the letter of what their loved one asked for. It's really powerful. I can imagine as a family member, it must feel like you're almost giving you confidence that you're doing the right thing by mum. Knowing this is actually what she wanted. I know this is what she wanted rather than feeling, Am I going to get this right? Am I really following her wishes? And I think that's the- I agree. As a funeral director, I've mentioned in a previous episode, having that paperwork in front of you with your loved ones wishes all in place, yeah we're getting the music right, yeah we're getting a venue where absolutely everything is right. And what you've just said there is absolutely true. That concern about from the loved ones that are remaining, are they getting things right? Is this what we should be doing? It's gone because it's already been discussed and chosen. Absolutely. And it's really important as well to mention that not every element of a person's wishes has a cost implication. So if a person wants to be dressed in their wedding dress or they want to be dressed in their pyjamas or whatever literally, you can go into as much detail as you want because there's different types of funeral plans. You can have a set plan. So that's an overall amount of money with an allowance towards third party costs. Or you can have what's called an independent way plan with Golden Charter, where literally the family itemise every single element of that funeral plan. So it's not a broad brush approach. It's a lot more definitive of what the family actually want, which is really powerful. So it's a flexibility element you I think is quite key. Absolutely important. What's your experience then of working with customers with a funeral plan in place? Do you see that as bringing an element of reassurance and comfort? It's really important. I'm a massive advocate of it because the family literally have nothing to worry about apart from deciding on the time and date, and we just literally go through ratifying the information that their loved one has given us. And some families, particularly families I've dealt with, sometimes I've had the privilege of actually providing the funeral plan in the first place and then actually looking after the person when they've passed away. So I've seen that loved one all the way through. And I can actually remember sitting down with that person that's now sadly passed away and them talking about some of their wishes. And I can recount some of those experiences with their loved one. And that really puts people at ease. And some people, they leave open-ended wishes of like, I like roses, but I want my daughter to decide on the type of rose arrangement that she wants to create for me, and the family like that their mum's essentially left them something to input their personality on their loved one's funeral, which is important. And I suppose the other benefit is that the money is there straight away to pay for those services. It's available immediately without having to wait for money to come from an estate. Exactly. You haven't got to worry about the financial implications. Absolutely. How long has Golden Charter been working with independent funeral directors? So we have a long history. We have been working with independent funeral directors for over 30 years. I suppose we... I think picking up on the point you made earlier, Joseph, about the partnership, I think that is a really important thing from our point of view from a customer perspective, because I think the value of the partnership that we have with independent funeral directors is incredibly important because customers are getting that local expertise, knowledge, care from their local funeral director alongside being able to work with a trusted national provider. So I think that partnership and that balance is quite powerful. There's infrastructure at Golden Charter. They provide us insights and things like that that we wouldn't necessarily have ourselves from a more national perspective that we can tailor it to our local community and make a difference. Is that one of the reasons why we chose Golden Charter? Absolutely. It was before my time, my dad chose, but it's been passed down to me and I think they're the right partners for us. Absolutely. I think it's a shared focus on the customer. I think from our point of view, we're really customer-centric. We talk to our customers regularly. We know that over 92% are satisfied or extremely satisfied. Also over 900,000 people have chosen to plan ahead with us. That's an awful big number. I think just sharing that customer focus and customer-centric values with the independent funeral directors we partner with is really important. What does the future look like? Funeral planning in the future? Regulation? That's a great question. I suppose looking back, first of all, I think financial conduct authority regulation of the funeral planning market has been hugely positive and I think is likely to have given customers increased reassurance. Looking ahead, I think that, touching on the point I made earlier, I think increasingly there's an opportunity for funeral planning, perhaps to be considered more like other forms of later life planning. If you think about retirement planning, you see all corners of government and industry really coming together to promote the benefits of planning ahead for your retirement. I think for funeral planning, there's an opportunity to do likewise make those conversations a bit more mainstream, a bit more natural. I think there's a shift towards that, that it is becoming less taboo, if you like, more of a mainstream conversation. People are understanding the value that is there from doing that and opening up those conversations. That's the purpose of this podcast, really, to try and break down those taboos and have these conversations to just raise awareness, basically. The FCA, you mentioned regulation. Is that likely to... Is there going to be more regulation, do you feel? Obviously, Joseph, you'll know more about this, but regulation of the at-need funeral market is coming. I think Financial Conduct Authority regulation of the funeral planning market has been really positive, as I mentioned, because I think it's really strengthened the standards, and everybody's working to those same rigorous standards set out by the FCA. I think that is really important from a consumer point of view. I think that widening of that into the- Absolutely necessary for the widening of the regulation. It won't be the FCA that regulates at need funerals, but the government most likely are going to regulate at need funerals. But it's really important that wider regulation comes in. Absolutely. I think it's important to stress as well. We have to have continual professional development and you have to be properly... 16 hours. Yeah, 16 hours. In all honesty, it's something I don't do, which is why I've got Joseph here as well in this conversation. The conversations about funeral plans with the client, with the family, it's all done properly. You can talk from experience there, can't you, Joseph? Yeah, absolutely. So G. Seller being an appointed representative of Golden Charter. So that's to be an appointed person within the business, which is me. And then there is planned sellers within the business that essentially have to follow the FCA process that Golden Charter have laid out for us. So we make sure that customers know exactly what they're buying. And it's not done on the back of a fag packet, essentially. It's done properly. So families can be, like Carly said, they can be rest assured that they're dealing with something that's reputable and it's done professionally. Brilliant. Marketing. Who markets the funeral plans? Is it us? Is it yourself? Do we work together? How does it work? Just for the listeners. A partnership approach, again, I would say, Andy. It's really about, from our point of view, supporting our independent funeral director partners to connect with prospective possible funeral plan customers within your community in the most sensitive, appropriate way possible. Joseph, you've probably got more of an insight into this leading on the marketing that you're going to take. We're really... We're really proactive in funeral planning and marketing because I think funerals are still a taboo subject, less so than they used to be, hence why we're doing a podcast like this. But as well, some people don't necessarily connect a funeral plan with a funeral director. They see it as two separate entities. And that's one thing that we're really passionate, that we want to encompass the two together. Because if you take a funeral plan out with a particular company, it doesn't necessarily mean you can have your chosen funeral as a character. So we want to be as proactive as possible to make sure that we can look after the people that want us to look after them. Absolutely brilliant. So Carly, how long have you been with Golden Charter? Over six years now. Yeah. It's a good long time. So how does it feel looking after the families the way you do? Just a bit of a personal question there. What's the impact on you as an individual? I really believe in the product and actually the value that it brings to so many people. I think a key part of the role that I do is working with our independent funeral director partners like yourselves to understand what information and support we can provide to you to help you connect as effectively as possible within your communities and offer funeral plans. So it's a really interesting role and one that I'm really privileged to be part of. A real tailored approach. Yeah, it's phenomenal. It's great. And it's great to see this strong relationship that we've got across It's two completely separate companies that work together to look after the family that's in need. Is there anything else you want to tell us before we leave? I don't think so. Put you on the spot. Put me on the spot. I thought you were maybe going to ask me if I had a funeral plan in place. Actually, it's a good question. Well, not yet, but I absolutely do intend to. I've gotten as far as deciding what music I would like, but I've not actually got my plan in place. But I do need to. So pitch that question back me. And Andy yourself, do you have a funeral plan in place? No, I haven't got a plan in place, but I've got one song in place already. One song in place? And I've got a three-page essay of all my funeral wishes in the file. Yes, and we're all well aware of said wishes as well. Not for a long time. Carly, Joseph, thank you very much both for your time. A safe journey back, Carly as well. Thank you. Please do like, share, subscribe. If you have any questions, email them to liftingthelid@gseller. co. uk. We will do our absolute best to answer them for you. And we'll see you next time.