So, you’re selling your funeral home. . . . and moving into retirement

We keep hearing that about 50% of the family owned funeral homes in North America will change hands within the next decade. . . .If there are about 20,000 funeral home in the U.S. and Canada that means that about 10,000 will be sold.

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That’s a lot of transactions.  The companies that help broker those deals should have some pretty good years during the next decade if that thinking continues to come to fruition.

One thing that I wonder is “Who is going to be the buyer of all those businesses?”  The consolidators want the larger firms, focusing on firms of at least 300 cases unless there is a strategic “bolt-on” to present operations.  It will be interesting to see who the buyers are and what the price points will be going forward. . . . However, this article is not about the sale of your funeral home but what you do after the sale. . . . . .

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

I faced that dilemma about a dozen years ago when for several reasons my brother and I decided it was time to exit our 4th generation funeral business and move into the next stage of our lives.  While our children were welcome to work at our funeral business we were also deliberate in letting them experience the “big, wide, world” where there were all kinds of other occupations that they might enjoy more.

Turns out that none of them were interested in Death Care and have all landed on their feet in occupations of their choosing.  Using Tom Johnson at Johnson Consulting Group as our guide we navigated the marketing and sale process of our business and found that there was “Life after Funeral Service”.

Retirement, if you can call what I’ve done since I sold the funeral home “Retirement” carries its own cadence to it that is much different than the cadence of operating a funeral home where there seemed to be an endless amount of “things on my plate” that were left for the next day.  That job, as much as I enjoyed it, had a cadence to it that never really let my mind get to far detached from what was happening at the fuenral home — there was always something that I was responsible for “tomorrow”.

Just last week I encountered this article that is titled “5 key retirement mistakes to avoid” published by Yahoo Finance.  I’ve had almost a dozen years to look back on my situation and I found it interesting how in looking back Angie and I have avoided most of those mistakes and our general intuition seems to have moved in sync with what the article states.

For instance, one of the mistakes the article points out is that people move to places to live simply to save on taxes.  We operated our funeral home and lived in Minnesota, which is a high tax state.  After retirement we were intrigued about moving to Florida for the six months required to claim residency there which would lower our tax burden and continue to live the other six months in Minnesota.

However, we tried renting for three months first to get an idea where we would purchase in Florida and how much we liked it.  We loved the three months in Florida but time proved to us that we were “Minnesotans at heart” and enjoyed being in Minnesota with our family for Christmas and three months in Florida was enough for us.  Angie also pointed out that I’m a “Type A” person and that if and when hurricanes were damaging Florida I would be at my wit’s end in Minnesota wondering what was happening to our home in Florida.

So, we continue to rent for three months in Florida and have been able to always rent in the same golf and living complex from when we first went.  We also now know that three months in the dead of Minnesota’s winter is just the right time for us — we are ready to come home following that time as we are still embedded in our Minnesota community as well.

In any regards, since we have lots of funeral home owners who read Funeral Director Daily, and some of them are probably at this thought stage, I thought this article would be a good little primer on some things to think about when going into retirement after you sell your funeral home.

For those of you that don’t want to read the full article, here are the 5 mistakes cited:

Mistake #1 – Underspending in early retirement  (While you are healthy and able to do things with no restrictions)

Mistake #2 – Prioritizing taxes over happiness in retirement location

Mistake #3 – Focusing too much on market risk while ignoring other threats (like inflation)

Mistake #4 – Poor tax bracket managment.

Mistake #5 – Claiming Social Security too early

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