Economically, times are hard for most people. Making ends meet is getting harder and harder. At the end of last summer, a general rise in gas and electricity rates was announced ahead of what turned out to be a bitterly cold winter. The ambivalence of the British economy’s bungee effect of growth reverting to shrinkage was ‘rewarded’ with the UK being downgraded from its AAA credit rating for the first time since 1978 to Aa1. The cost of living keeps on increasing and alas, so does the cost of dying.

The Funeral Planning Authority’s figures show that last year, the total sales of pre-paid funeral plans increased by seven percent as people opted to protect themselves from the rising costs of funerals. The increasing sales were calculated by Golden Charter to be worth a record £374 million.

Nearly 121,000 pre-paid funeral plans were sold last year, which relates to about 8,000 more than 2011, and providers are seeing strong continuous growth this year.

There are over 760,000 pensioners that now have a funeral plan in place, up from 693,000 and 10 percent of all funerals last year were funded by an existing plan. When one considers that the average price of a funeral plan is £3,100, this equates to an estimated £2 billion invested in plans in total.

The advantage of having a funeral plan in place is that plan holders are protected from inflation and benefit from the peace of mind of knowing that their family will not be left facing funeral bills no matter how far into the future the funeral will be needed.

The growth in pre-paid funeral plans is being driven by recognition of the fact that costs of funerals are increasing and we are fast approaching a time of the year when pre-paid funeral prices are set to rise again to keep in line with current at-need funeral prices.

With plans set to rise by as much as £352 or even more depending on the provider you choose, perhaps now is the time to beat the price rise and combat inflation by investing in a pre-paid funeral plan.