Choosing cremation with services has advantages and disadvantages.  In many ways this choice combines the benefits of traditional funeral services with the cost savings associated with cremation.

Cremation with services: advantages

Choosing cremation with services can be more therapeutic than choosing direct cremation for some families.  Because this choice includes some type of remembrance ceremony (e.g. a viewing or funeral ceremony), many families find this more comforting than direct cremation.

The viewing or memorial service allows friends and family to share in commemorating the life of the deceased and gives friends a chance to comfort the family.

Cremation can also be much less expensive than a full traditional funeral.  Choosing cremation allows you to eliminate many costs associated with funerals including the casket, gravesite, cemetery fee, and headstone cost.

Many people also consider cremation a more environmentally-friendly option because no land is disturbed for burial purposes.

Another benefit of cremation is that it provides portability of cremains.  If surviving family members move away, they can easily take cremated remains with them.

Cremation also allows for a wide variety of disposition options.  While some families do decide to bury cremains in a cemetery, most families simply take the cremains home.  However, many other options exist.  Please see the Funeral Saver's Kit for a complete discussion of cremation options.

The average cost of cremation with services handled through a funeral home is between $2,000 and $4,000.  If these same services are handled directly through a crematory, you can expect to pay between $1,500 and $3,000.

When choosing cremation following a funeral service, you can expect to pay between $4,000 to $6,000 at a funeral home or $3,000 to $4,000 at a crematory.

Typically, these prices include the cost of the actual cremation and a basic memorial service.  Some families may instead choose to cremate the body after first holding a viewing or funeral ceremony.

This type of cremation with service can increase costs considerably by requiring you to purchase a casket and pay more for the funeral director's basic services.

You can find and compare local cremation costs at Parting.com

How much do you think it costs to cremate a dead body? It’s a question you probably don’t think about until tragedy strikes and you’re planning the funeral of a loved one.

One of the last things anyone wants to do when they've lost a loved one is make a complicated financial decision. Families want to spend that time celebrating a life, not hunting for the best rate on the memorial service. If a funeral home quotes you a price for a cremation, you’ll probably just assume you’re being treated fairly and accept the price.

So it may come as a surprise that the price of basic services like cremation can vary wildly from home to home. Today the average cost of a standalone cremation -- no additional services -- is $2,057. And yet, in any given city, some funeral homes will charge you two to three times as much for a cremation. Same service, drastically different price.

Even more troubling, in the Internet age funeral parlors tend to make pricing hard to find. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission allows funeral homes to keep their rates hidden until someone actually writes or calls a funeral home representative -- leaning on regulations last updated in 1994 -- rather than pushing funeral homes to let the customer compare online. In a survey by the nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance, only 25 percent of funeral homes fully disclosed prices on their websites, while 16 percent failed to disclose prices after an email and a phone call.

Tough access to comparison shopping seems to affect pricing. At Parting, we’ve painstakingly built a database of how much funeral homes charge for services so that no one ever gets ripped off in their time of need. Let’s walk through the data.

If recent trends continue, cremations will account for over half of all funerals by 2018, up from about a quarter in 1998.