A Guide to Understanding Cremation Costs in Toronto Before You Get a Quote

I'm a writer by trade, and budgets, the boring, undramatic stuff of finance, and paying off debt, I write about money - and even I was taken aback by how opaque cremation pricing is when my aunt died last year in Toronto, without anyone in the family making any such plans in advance.

The first quote that I received was impressive. “Starting at” 1,300 dollars. I nearly made a booking by phone before I got to the inevitable money question that I ask about everything else: What isn't this figure?

Turns out, a lot. There was a charge for transporting outside a radius of a predetermined distance. The extra death certificate copies were each additional. The basic urn in the starting price was actually a cardboard box and adding the option to an urn that would be kept on a shelf cost an additional couple hundred dollars. When I did the math in my head of what our family would be using that $1,300 coming down the road, it was more like $2,200.

So, I made a spreadsheet like I do with any other thing. I reached out to three other companies that provide cremation services Toronto families are using, and posed the same six questions to each of them: the total price (including tax), if transport was limited by distance, how many death certificates included, what the urn was, if there were weekend or after hours charges, and if the final bill could be different from the original quoted amount.

At the four-thousand mark, two out of three became visibly at ease. One provided me with a flat, full number at the time and kept that number on the actual bill that arrived a week later; this was the direct cremation Toronto service that we went with and that number was on the paper and was the same number on the actual bill, which I don't think is standard practice in this business.

So this is what I'd say to anyone planning ahead for this: The “all-inclusive” claim is meaningless until someone says it to you when asked, for example, how much does the pallet cost? Ask "Is that the total or the starting point?" and wait for a good answer and see how fast they respond to you. If a provider is not willing to answer that question in the phone call, they will be not willing to answer in the final bill.

We managed to end up spending a bit less than the GTA industry average, largely because we asked prior to signing rather than after. I realize that's a no-brainer lesson. I didn't see it coming at 11:00 pm after visiting the funeral home that I would be even more confused than when I arrived.

If your family is in a situation where you are thinking about making a phone call decision, or are already making a phone call decision, why not do the phone call math before the grief math? It's one of the few things about this whole thing you get to control.