Heritage Coach Dealer Blog USA

Funeral homes across the country are adding video equipment to their facilities in an effort to give family members overseas a chance to say goodbye. One funeral home owner in the Twin Tiers region – Brad Perkins – is joining the trend.

Perkins, owner of the Dryden area Perkins Funeral Home, recently invested in some state-of-the-art video equipment to allow family members overseas to view the funeral of a loved one. During the holiday season, Perkins is offering this service for free for military families. Perkins is the son of a WWII soldier so he knows the comfort of instant communication during the most tragic events in a family’s life. That’s not something he had growing up because communication with soldiers overseas took so long.

“To realize that those messages took 10 days to two months to arrive, now we can do something that’s virtually live, that’s right away. We can record a message today, and it can be seen 40 seconds later in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he explained.

Is your funeral home equipped with video equipment to serve those family members who cannot make it to the funeral services? If not, you may be missing out!

Mock funerals tend to be the way to get attention and make your cause known these days. The students at UNC-Asheville recognize this and used a mock funeral to bring awareness to the cancelled EARN scholarship for students at the school.

The Students for a Democratic Society held the demonstration earlier this month as part of a “national day of action for education rights” that was initiated by the Network to Fight for Economic Justice, a new group on campus. During the demonstration, pallbearers carried fake caskets to the “quad” while making stops along the way. At the end of the journey, there was a tombstone which remained there for the rest of the week to commemorate the end of the EARN scholarship’s availability for UNCA students because it was “struck down by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.”

More than 10,000 students in the state received the EARN scholarship to attend college. It was designed to help lower-income students and families afford the high cost of going to school. However, the scholarship was cut at the state level because of budget shortfalls, which the Students for a Democratic Society do not agree with because many of the top administrators are still bringing in more than $100,000 per year.

Securing financing for anything has been really tough lately for small businesses and consumers. Knowing this, we want to make sure that we are there to support our customers when they begin the financing process. On our website, we have financial resources and tools designed to make the hearse and limousine buying process less stressful and more successful for our customers. You can fill out an online finance/lease application, check out different lease options, and calculate your monthly payment with our online finance calculator. Click the image below to see how it works.

If you’d rather work with someone from Heritage Coach, our sales team will assist you throughout the entire financing process. There are several ways you can structure your financing in order to comfortably afford a hearse or limousine. Our consultants can guide you through the pros and cons of these various options. Basically, there are three main types of lease agreements that we deal with on a daily basis for our customers. They are:

• Straight Lease
• Lease-Purchase
• Trac Lease

Each lease type is described on our website under Finance & Lease Information.

If you’re in the market for a hearse or limousine, but think that you’ll never be able to secure financing in this economy, definitely check out our website. If you’d rather talk with someone face-to-face, don’t hesitate to give us a call at 610-862-0560 to setup an appointment with a member of our sales team, or simply stop by our Conshohocken, PA location.

If you have attended several military funerals in recent months, you may have noticed a couple of them playing “Taps” over a tape recorder. That just does not have the same effect as hearing it live, but a shortage of bugle players have made the taped version a necessity for families who want to hear it at the ceremony.

In Long Island, New York, Louis DiLeo is the only bugle player available in the southern region of NY’s Military Forces Honor Guard to play the touching notes at services for fallen military personnel. Due to the shortage, he is keeping quite busy traveling to various funerals in the area to give families their desire to hear “Taps” played live on a bugle. According to DiLeo, he started doing this more than three years ago and he has not missed a day during that time.

Are you a bugler who is able to travel around your area and provide this last tribute to fallen soldiers? If so, please contact your local VFW office or military reserve to let them know. It’s a great way to spend your time while lightening the load for the few buglers who are left.

You know things are getting bad these days when thieves are targeting the funeral cars of mourners during a graveside service.

That’s exactly what Stacy Egan and Thomas Beach did recently. They were arrested for stealing anything they found in the funeral cars at a cemetery while the owners of those cars were saying goodbye to a loved one.

“These two had no regard for people who are grieving,” said a spokesperson for Sheriff Tom Dart. After being arrested, the two admitted to some unsolved thefts that occurred over the summer at cemeteries. The two thieves have been charge with stealing items like GPS devices, iPods, purses, wallets, loose change and more. However, the authorities let them go after they posted 10 percent of the $75,000 bond.

With the economy getting worse every day, you’re not even safe when you are at the cemetery grieving the loss of you friends and loved ones. These types of crimes are going to become more common as people have fewer financial resources. Be sure to lock your cars when you are parked at the cemetery and anywhere else for that matter. You never know when you are going to be the victim of one of these thieves.