Funerals for Less: 7 Ways to Save Money and Help Mother Nature and Humankind on Your Way Out

Failure to plan for funerals will always cost our relatives, when we leave them with the overwhelming task of answering multiple-choice questions under a state of shock and grief. Preparing your final exit is a team effort and it's a lot more satisfying than you think.

After reporting on the resuscitated art of caring for our dead at home, and questioning why embalming is a standard practice in the United States, I decided to end my three-part series on a high note: how to dispose of our dead bodies at a low cost. If trips to the cemetery haven't been on your schedule in a long, long time, then why not consider this selection of non-traditional alternatives that will cut down on your overall funeral expenses. They will get you more than what you pay for, and you may not have to pay anything at all. Here are seven alternative methods to dispose of our bodies.

Note: There are two forms of body donations: organ donations and whole-body donations. Since this story is focused on economics, we are only looking at whole-body donations because, in the case of organ donations, the body is typically returned to the family after the organs have been removed and they will have to bear the cost of either cremation or burial. Keep in mind that organ donations are just as vital as whole-body donations.

1. Donate Your Whole Body to Science

Cost: $0. Most universities and research centers will pick up the body and transport it to their facility at no cost to you within an amount of designated mileage.

Type: This one is for the altruists. Even though we're past the time when cadavers had to be snatched from cemeteries at night for the advancement of medicine, universities and research centers still want you under their scalpel.

Pros: "A leg can be sent to an orthopedic researcher, for instance," writes Tara Parker-Pope in the Wall Street Journal, "while a head can be studied by a neurosurgeon."

"The vast majority of the public has no sense of the breadth of uses for cadavers," says Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. "The nitty, gritty reality is the body goes where it's needed, and sometimes that means you have to cut it into pieces. It's part of the respect of the person that you make the most of it."

"Some research doesn't involve cutting the body," adds Parker-Pope, "but rather studying how a body endures a car crash or whether safety equipment can protect a body from an explosion or fall."

Whole-body donations also help find cures. "Areas such as colon cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, cervical cancer, women's health care studies and spinal studies can only be advanced through the study of the human anatomy," notes LifeQuest Anatomical, a private company matching whole-body donors with research centers. "In the U.S.," adds LifeQuest, "950,000 people die every year of heart disease, 547,000 of cancer and 100,000 die from Alzheimer's disease."

Cons: To leave the unflattering realm of cadavers and be transformed into an anatomical gift, you have to meet high standards of admission: "Anything that destroys or distorts the normal anatomy of the body extensively can make it difficult to conduct meaningful anatomical study," states UCLA's body donation program, i.e. don't show up after an autopsy, if you died of a violent death, you weigh more than 250 pounds, you've already gifted your organs to other programs or you're in an advanced state of decomposition, among other disqualifying criteria.

If you're a pacifist, you will want to make sure the program you are choosing will not use your body for military studies. If you're lucky, you will find an institution that will divulge what your body will be used for and where. High demand has led to the creation of a black market for body parts. Make sure your program's employees are subjected to the same high criteria of admission that your dead body is. However, in the case of past scandals, "while there were certainly ethical lapses and administrative mistakes," writes Parker-Pope, "all of the bodies were nonetheless used for legitimate medical research."