{ "item_title" : "The Last Bill", "item_author" : [" Margaret Ellis "], "item_description" : "The average American family overpays for a funeral by thousands of dollars - and almost none of it is because they were cheated.It happens in the first hour. A nurse asks, in a kind voice, which funeral home to call. You say a name because someone is waiting and it seems unkind to make them stand there. Twenty seconds. That single answer, given before you knew you were deciding anything, will shape a five-figure bill you have not seen yet.Here is what nobody tells you: within one American city, price surveys have found the exact same direct cremation offered from a few hundred dollars to nearly five thousand. Same service. Same county. Sometimes the same crematory doing the work for both. That spread is not quality. It is a measurement of what a grieving person will pay without calling anyone else.This is the funeral consumer's guide written for the night it actually happens.Not a history of the industry. Not a memoir. A working manual, organized by the clock instead of by the topic, that starts where you are - at eleven at night, with a legal pad, and a funeral home expecting an answer in the morning.Inside: The first hour. The three things that genuinely have to happen tonight, and the one sentence that stops the most expensive decision of the week from being made by accident.The four-minute phone call. Word for word. Funeral homes are required by the FTC Funeral Rule to give you prices over the phone, and you do not have to give your name. When the FTC ran an undercover sweep of more than 250 providers, it found violations on 39 calls - most of them refusals to quote a price. Learn what to say when that happens to you.The four decisions that are most of your bill - and why the ones you agonize over are not among them.A real itemized statement, audited line by line. Watch $9,240 become $7,194 at the same funeral home, with a hearse, flowers, a graveside service, and a proper casket still in the total.Fifteen sentences you can actually say out loud, including the exact reply to most families find comfort in the protective seal.The truth about embalming. No state requires it routinely. Refrigeration is usually an acceptable alternative, and it costs a fraction.Cremation vs. burial economics, plus green burial, alkaline hydrolysis, human composting, and home funerals - with the honest answer about what is legal where you live and how to check.The cemetery bill nobody warns you about, and why the consumer rights you just learned largely stop at the cemetery gate.The money nobody mentions. The $255 Social Security death payment, VA burial allowances, union and fraternal benefits, crime victim compensation, and county assistance. One family recovered $4,180 against a $3,900 funeral.How to preplan without prepaying - the payable-on-death account that does everything a preneed contract does, without handing a stranger nine thousand dollars for a service to be delivered decades from now.How to audit a prepaid plan someone else bought, when the funeral home has changed hands twice and nobody can tell you what it covers.Every chapter ends with a tool: a checklist, a script, a worksheet, a decision tree. They are formatted to be photographed on your phone and carried into the room.This book will not tell you to skip the funeral. People need to stand in a room together and eat too much ham and say the wrong thing to each other. That is not a luxury item. What it will tell you is that the gathering and the transaction were welded together by somebody else, and that they come apart far more easily than anyone is going to mention.You are not being asked to be braver. You are being asked to do things in a different order.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/221/9798192216927_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "14.95", "online_price" : "14.95", "our_price" : "14.95", "club_price" : "14.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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