How Does a Cemetery Make Money? | Our Everyday Life

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Perform a keyword search, you may find good explanations in past threads. You should also consider looking for your question in the FAQ. ELI5 how cemeteries make money once they are full. This was asked a few days ago.

Burials and Cemeteries Go Green : NPR

Sometimes there are on-going maintenance fees. Cemeteries don't pay property taxes, so there's no real expenses beyond that which is covered by those fees. And they are selling the plots for far more than the original cost of the land; but essentially, when it's fully sold they are not making any more profit from the land - just like any other property sale.

It's not really that different from a developer buying a piece of land, improving building lots with roads and utilities, and selling off the lots to homeowners. In some states, a cemetery has to set money aside in a trust fund to pay for future maintenance once it's no longer active.

They basically close once they're full and the trust takes care of the basic maintenance. This doesn't apply to all cemeteries or in all states. At our cemetery you buy a piece of land for 15 years. After 15 years the grave is emptied and filled with a new coffin.

This way the cemetery has a fairly constant source of income. You sell the land. Jewish law forbids bothering a dead persons grave.

That's why you still get old, disused Jewish cemeteries all over Europe. I live in the old caretakers residence of one.

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There's no public access, a synagogue trust owns it and just keeps up the maintenance, making sure no one ever bothers the people buried there.

It's been out of use for almost years now. When I go, I just want to be chummed and sprayed into the ocean.

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It's the least I can do after all the things I've said about certain fish. The funeral industry in North America is a massive con, and the fantastic profits don't lie just in the burials; although that segment is extremely lucrative. The market is rife with predatory practices, and your burial-plot is just one of many opportunities this vertically-integrated industry takes to gouge the naive consumer. An excellent eye-opener on this often shady business is the classic American Way Of Death , by the famous muckraking journalist, Jessica Mitford.

What guarantee do we have that years down the road, the cemetary isn't going to get bought and have a fuckin mall built over everyone buried there? I hope someone notices and can answer this: Or must it be on a piece of land specified for the burial of dead bodies? You don't have to make money with a cemetery once it's full, so long as the money you've already made is properly set aside to maintain it.

Depends on where at, there are a lot of different practices, where I'm from the church usually owns the property, they sell the plots to people and when they are full the only expense is a bit of maintenance, but considering how much money they made off digging holes and putting dead people in them for no reason the initial profit is a lot more than the cost. From reading the comments, it seems that nobody knows about green burials natural burials.

Most states allow them and there are places that specialize in them. My mother is the curator for a cemetery in my town. For reference, it is owned by the town it is in, a nearby town, and the township, so they are not really there to make money.

Here is how their funding works as I understand it:. Things like flowers, monuments, tombstones, and the like are paid for separately and do not go through the cemetery. To answer the question: If this cemetery were full, they would get money the same way rich people do: Not all cemeteries make money though; my older brother was buried in a very rural cemetery that has plots dating back to the early s.

Obviously though, there isn't much room for additional burials I'm not entirely sure how one would be buried there at this point; he was buried next to my great-grandfather and there isn't much room left. My baby brother has been buried. Basicaly, cities are your answer. They are forced to maintain cemetaries after they fill up. Many cemetaries have trust funds, but these usually don't last more than a century. Around here, when a cemetery stops being profitable it reverts ownership to the local government.

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Does this happen in the middle of the night?? All the money made goes to the church and all the costs come from the church. Here is how their funding works as I understand it: Each year, the owners pay an amount to the cemetery for maintenance and for her small salary she is the only employee.

This comes from taxpayers as far as I am aware. There is a cost for the plot and burial. This is usually paid directly to the contractor that does the digging.

There is an additional "perpetual care" fee. This fee is put into an endowment for the cemetery. The interest from this fund pays for things like grass cutting and other landscape work. Posts are automatically archived after 6 months.