Rising costs of dying has led Americans to turn to crowdfunding campaigns for funerals. How is that affecting ...
Jun 3, 2018She had only been alive for 13 months. Her condition, a genetic disease known as spinal muscular atrophy, had first presented as muscle weakness. At the end, she could not move her muscles. She could neither say if she was hungry nor feed herself if she was. But funerals cost money, and Skylynne Bogaski’s parents had spent most of theirs on her medical treatments by the time she died in 2017. So, they did what a lot of people are doing now and reached out for help. “We knew if we didn’t raise the money, she wouldn’t have had a funeral,” said Joe Bogaski, Skylynne’s half-brother. “We see GoFundMe campaigns all the time, so we thought, ‘Why don’t we try?’” They had to try. Rising funeral costs have forced families to try meeting expenses through online crowd-funding initiatives. Digital apps and websites such as YouCaring, Indiegogo and Elegy offer fundraising options geared toward funerals and memorials. GoFundMe is a leading crowd-sourcing campaign site that claims to have raised more than $5 billion. Type “funeral” into a crowd-funding search engine and it will show at least 750 Pittsburgh-area GoFundMe campaigns. This makes sense, as the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) reports that average cremation-viewing costs $6,260 — and traditional viewings and burials cost $1,100 on top of that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that national funeral expenses have spiked by over 220 percent since 1986, much higher than inflation over that time period. Reasons include rising costs of caskets and land. Add that with Allegheny County’s death rates (amongst the nation’s highest), local funeral directors said they were not surprised to experience a significant uptick in Pittsburghers utilizing crowd-funding sources to pay the bills. click to enlarge ...
