Preparedness for when

Frugalsod

Funerals are getting expensive.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2543006/The-rising-cost-dying-Average-funeral-costs-7-600-thousands-struggling-afford-fitting-send-off.html

sorryImoved

GreyQueen wrote: »

((((((((sorryImoved)))))))) sorry to hear that hubby's surgery is clashing with the Thanksgiving holiday. As you mentioned, we don't have that as part of our holiday traditions, but it sounds essentially like a trad UK christmas dinner but with added extras (I have a vague notion that pumpkin pie is usually involved?)

From bystanding at mum's side when Christmas turkeys were cooked, I can think of a few tips. First off, do you have one oven or two? As in, will the turkey need to be roasted and put to one side and the oven used for other things? Most of my turkey-trauma memories involved timing crises over a single oven. There's nothing particularly scary about a whole turkey (just think of it as a chicken-on-steroids), there's a formula for the amount of minutes' cooking per pound of weight, plus another time element for the bird. This is printed on the wrapper here, probably in US too? Or any cookbook should tell you.

Will you be cooking a bird from fresh or from frozen? And if the latter, do you know the defrosting time, given your climate? Make sure you know that, if thawing a frozen bird, and that you have plenty of time to cook it. The stuffing in the bird can be a problem, have you considered the alternate way, making little stuffing balls and cooking them on a cookie sheet? It's easier than going vaguely-gynaecological things with poultry, doesn't affect the cooking time of the bird, and looks cute, too.

I'd look at buying in as much as possible. If your guests are those who'd feel short-changed by shop-bought stuff, decant stuff from jars into bowls in the fridge and hide the evidence. You can get canned pumpkin in the US, I think, sure I saw a reference to it?

I'd start with a time, plot what you need to do backwards from that to get it on the table, look at every component of the meal and see what you can cheat on, and make a shopping plan to get you there in time.

Oh, and you can give wretched turkeys (or chickens) a bit more flavour by stuffing a citrus or two, with their skins scored to release the zestiness, into the body cavity. Nice use for a Floridian orange or two, takes moments, gives a flavoursome bird and the impression that you are a capital-C cook. (Thanks to pal J who taught me this trick).

I bet that there are cheat sheets to Thanksgiving cookery somewhere on the web.

I have to admit that turkey bores the stuffing outta me (sorry! ) and the getting up at sparrowfart o'clock to wrangle one into the stove was causing Christmas stress. So, in discussion with Mum and her MIL, we segued smoothly into a beef joint instead of a birdie for our family christmas dinner. Much tastier and easier to cook. 'Preciate moving away from turkey for this traditonal holiday wouldn't be likely to be acceptable, tho. HTH.

ETA; years ago, turkeys over here used to come with their giblets removed, packed into a plastic bag, and this stuffed back up the rear of the bird. One year my Mum looked for them in the usual place, didn't see them and assumed they had been left out, which would have annoyed the cats as they got them cooked down for their Xmas dinner. Only they were in the bird, plastic bagged, but had been stuffed down the neck-hole instead of up the rear. They got roasted along with the bird. Ooops!

GQ I haven't laughed so hard in a long time! "vaguely-gynaecological things with poultry" has to be the best description I have ever heard of preparing a turkey. You are a joy! The citrus tip I will be using for sure. Sounds wonderful. I will be giggling as I make my way through cooking a whole turkey for the first time thanks to you. The huge beast is thawing in the fridge and I've been intimidated every time I open the door but you've given me a much needed boost of confidence. Thank you:rotfl::rotfl:

BigMummaF

My in-laws passed within four months of onset of any definable symptoms (he with heart, her & much-loved BIL with the Big C.) & my father was pretty Ok till the last 10 days or so--weary more than anything else, at home & mooching around as though laid low by a "virus"--so this is coming as completely untried territory with Mum.

I have always despaired at how you can be sleighted for animal cruelty if you let a pet linger, but there is nothing in place to give humans a dignified end to their suffering. Of course I don't want my family to shuffle from this mortal coil but given the choice, I'd rather hold the smoking gun myself than watch as whatever vicious disease invade the body & destroy their very soul



It's interesting to see how people have thought their "disposal" might be.. I'm pretty certain that the family is still responsible for funeral costs even if you are an organ donor, likewise if you have no immediate next of kin but there are cousins etc. so you may want to find that out for definite. It's also a lot harder to donate your remains to medical science than you'd think, unless you had something more unusual during your Life... my sister used to work for a funeral directors so I asked a LOT of questions & curiously, The Offsprings wayward parent is an undertaker :rotfl:
Me? I'm just [STRIKE]bluddin nosy[/STRIKE] naturally curious about all things medical

GreyQueen

Glad I made you laugh, sorryImoved.

Life is a series of farces strung together with serious bits and boring bits, in my experience, at least. Like there's a wickedly-grinning Playwright and Director conniving in the wings, just bursting with merriment as the next pratfall is lined up, and the poor old actors fall over again.

If you understand the innate silliness of much that we do, it's easier to cope with Life. And stuffing things inside poultry is very silly and feels a bit impertinent to me; we haven't even been introducted and we're doing what?!

A lemon is a good choice for a chicken but I guess one to two oranges would fit inside a turkey. If asked about it, you could tell the rellies it's a traditional Florida recipe and you've gone native.......:rotfl:

A couple of peeps in my extended family raised turkeys on their smallholding two years running. The first year they had the all-white birds which are the staple of commercial turkey-rearing over here. Fowl of such utter stupidity that they didn't even have the wit to get out of the rain or indoors at night. The second year, they raised an heirloom breed and they acted more like natural birds.

People have raised turkeys (2-3) on our allotment site. They got rustled at Christmastide. Given the size and grumpiness of a live turkey, I kinda think anyone prepared to sneak onto a veggie plot and steal them has probably earned their dinner.

Doveling

GQ -you are wasted in a call centre. Life as a stand up comedienne is yours for the taking.:D

GreyQueen

Doveling wrote: »

GQ -you are wasted in a call centre. Life as a stand up comedienne is yours for the taking.:D

I'm far too shy IRL to do such a thing. Although one of my pals is a stand-up comedienne. You won't have heard of her as it's a hobby gig and she only performs occasionally in our city.

I'm one of the million UK call centre workers and, if my workplace is anything to go by, there's an awful lot of witty people answering the nation's phones. We have a very high standard of humour at my workplace and I only just manage to keep up with the rest of them..........:rotfl:

Lots of us are on the lamm from proper professional jobs as we've discovered that the extra money for the prestigious career handle ain't worth the aggro.

thriftwizard

You think turkeys are grumpy, you should try geese! They're not kept as guard birds just for the noise... maybe they're bright enough to see Christmas coming.

I'm actually happy to pay the extra for a pure-bred, decently-raised bird or two; we don't spend a fortune on anything else much at Christmas, and we do keep a few birds ourselves, though we don't have room for big ones, and we take a bit of pride in trying to give them a decent life. But none of what I spend will go to waste; there'll be turkey curry, turkey pasties, turkey fricassee and most importantly, turkey bone-broth soup. The cats will be happy bunnies, so to speak, with any giblets & scraps peeled off off the neck bones. So it'll be money well-spent.

Trying now to focus on a weird blend between prepping & decluttering; stocks have got a bit low in one or two departments, which needs to be remedied so I can face the Festive Season without fretting about running out of loo roll, but at the same time the house is still horribly cluttered between my stock & working tools and DS2 & the TDiL's stuff. It helps that we had a very successful pop-up market yesterday & came home with the car much emptier than it went, and the coffers a fair bit fuller. There are two more to go before Christmas, but I still have too much stock to fit in the space allotted!

Must also carve out the time to get to the mill; we're out of strong white flour already.

jk0

I'm sure I could afford to either be buried at cost to my estate, or to pre-pay, but I am concerned that these pre-pay schemes may be a Ponzi scheme. Google definition:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator.

I worry that you might pay for a 'gold star' funeral when you are 50, but by the time you die at 80 the value of money has been so eroded that you just get the very cheapest funeral they can come up with. Or worse still, the company declares themselves bankrupt for the same reason, and your family have to pay all over again.

GreyQueen

From talking to the public, it seems that the ballpark figure around here for a non-fancy funeral is £4,000. That's a lot of money. Plenty of people die with less than that in assets and the family are scraping to pay for it.

Funeral costs take first dibs on the estate, and all other creditors have to wait.

You can get buried by the local authority. Under Section 46 of the Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984, they will have to arrange a burial if, after an investigation, there is no one who is making arrangements for the desceased. They will recover the cost, if possible, from the estate of the deceased or from any person responsible for maintaining them before their death. You can't make private funeral arrangements yourself and then hand the bill to the LA saying you can't pay it. We do a couple of these at most per year in our city.

Funeral directors can be very manipulative because they know people are very unlikely to want to haggle, shop around, or even be seen to be cheap at such a time. Things like making sure that the cheapest options for coffins aren't shown, things like that. Also, a lot of what we are probably still thinking of as family firms who have traded in our areas for generations are now owned by big American companies and are hiding their corporateness behind the old names.

I was very concerned about my hometown, which had been managing perfectly happily with one funeral parlour, when we suddenly got another three within the space of a year. I know the country has an aging population but that's ridiculous.

Softstuff

jk0 wrote: »

I'm sure I could afford to either be buried at cost to my estate, or to pre-pay, but I am concerned that these pre-pay schemes may be a Ponzi scheme. Google definition:



I worry that you might pay for a 'gold star' funeral when you are 50, but by the time you die at 80 the value of money has been so eroded that you just get the very cheapest funeral they can come up with. Or worse still, the company declares themselves bankrupt for the same reason, and your family have to pay all over again.

That's not the experience we've had with them, the ones we've taken out are also independently underwritten, so in the event of the funeral directors going bust, you'll still be ok. That said though, aside from a slightly better coffin, the prepaid funerals we've had (we've had 3 prepaid, 2 we've "used"), have been the very basic ones, aside from a slightly better coffin. Obviously YMMV.