Death Shouldn't Feel Taboo: A Conversation with Ean Sinn

Transcript

Introducing Ian Sinn's Funeral Business

Speaker 1 0:00

All right, we are ready to go, we are here, season 2.

Speaker 2 0:04

This is, believe it or not, episode 12 of this season, which started January 1st. Okay, yeah, right, and I've got with me today.

Speaker 1 0:11

Ian.

Speaker 2 0:11

Sinn from Sinn's Family Celebration of Life Center. I wrote all that down so I would have it right and Ian, welcome.

Speaker 1 0:19

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 0:20

Oh, you're more than welcome. Let me flip you up this a little bit. Let's pull that a little closer to you. If you can tilt that back some. You should have checked that before, huh.

Speaker 1 0:28

Okay, now say something. All right, how are we doing? Oh, excellent.

Speaker 2 0:31

Okay, yeah, now you're really good, perfect. So we're just going to talk today. You know a little bit, yep, okay, did you see last week's paper? Go back a week we had the little pictures on the front page. Yes, the little girls. Yep, did you see the one with the little arms crossed? I did, that was funny. I thought is that attitude? Or what? If I was her grandfather, you know she'd get whatever she wanted. She's got grandpa wrapped around her finger.

Speaker 1 1:02

Absolutely yeah, my grandkids have me wrapped around their finger.

Speaker 2 1:05

Papa, can I have?

Speaker 1 1:07

No, no, no, okay, how's your son Good? Yeah, he's having a lot of fun. He's at daycare today. Okay, just loves it. He comes home dirty and sweaty, but I can tell he's had the most fun ever, that's good for him.

Speaker 2 1:23

Yeah, it's good for a boy to get dirty. Good for little girls to get dirty, absolutely, you betcha. How old is he now?

Speaker 1 1:29

He's going to be 14 months next week. 14 months, I wonder how many months I am.

Speaker 2 1:34

That's a good question. That is a good one, right? His name's Marvin, right, yeah, marvin.

Speaker 1 1:40

Yeah, okay, actually we have two stories we tell, depending on if you're a dog person or not. Okay, if you're a dog person, the first dog toy we ever got for our golden retriever Dolly was Marvin the Moose, so technically he's named after Marvin the Moose.

Speaker 1 1:55

And that's what we tell people when we know they like dogs, but when we know maybe they're a little older, maybe they wouldn't find that story cute. We do have Grandma Marlene on Crystal's side and two Grandpa Irvins on my side, so part of the reason was Marvin kind of sounds like Marlene and Irvin. All right, all right, there's two reasons, but mostly the dog toy.

Speaker 2 2:14

Well, there's not. That's a good story. There's not a lot of Marvins.

Speaker 1 2:19

No, no, not anymore. I run into more people who say oh, that was my grandpa's name. Yeah, I run into more people who say oh, that was my grandpa's name.

Speaker 2 2:27

Yeah, If they're already in their 70s, that was my dad's name. I have a friend who we grew up way back and he now would be middle 70s, maybe late 70s. Only Marvin would have ever known him in my life until now. So I always wondered. I thought, hmm, there's got to be a story.

Speaker 1 2:38

Well, and my name is spelled wrong. I mean Ian is E-A-N.

Speaker 2 2:41

Oh, I know, that's how I spell it, so normally people assume it's I-N.

Speaker 1 2:44

So Crystal and I decided early on we want a name that clearly says this is a boy and it's spelled normally and people are never going to guess how it's spelled.

Speaker 2 2:54

That's true. Yeah, my son is a Sean and there's three spellings. Of course that's tough, yeah, and he's W-N, so anyway, I didn't like the other two spellings.

Speaker 1 3:05

That's okay. Scene I didn't like Scene S-E-A-N.

Speaker 2 3:08

I know it's Sean, but you know.

Speaker 1 3:09

But yeah, Marvin, as far as I know, you could probably throw a Y in there or something, but for the most part people are going to guess it right.

Journey into the Funeral Industry

Speaker 2 3:15

Yeah, yeah. We had a great day when the boys were little and we named him Marvin, and he loved those boys, but he would trip them and he was so huge he'd jump on them, and my youngest son was so little that he was scared to death of him. And so we gave Marvin to a guy who had a farm, and that Great Dane was perfect on that farm man. He was a good-looking Great Dane though, oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 3:39

Yeah, anyway, we're going to talk today about just a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Tell me first, though, what got you into the funeral business.

Speaker 1 3:50

Yeah, so I don't have family in the funeral business, which historically that's how most people started in a funeral home. If their dad was a funeral director, then the son would be a funeral director, it's not really the case nowadays anymore, If you look at mortuary schools it's growing to be more and more women.

Speaker 1 4:03

It's growing really the case nowadays anymore, if you look at mortuary schools. It's growing to be more and more women. It's growing to be more and more second career people. It's growing to be more people who just have never been involved in a funeral home in their family and for me. I grew up on a farm and farming was never something I was overly passionate about.

Speaker 2 4:22

I liked helping my dad in the tractor.

Speaker 1 4:24

But I liked being able to say you know what I don't want to do this this week. So if you're a farmer you have to be there and you have to commit to it, and knowing that wasn't the path I felt like I was going to go in my life.

Speaker 1 4:35

I wanted to look for something different, so I had to do a job shadow in my physics class and that was with Ms Brutally back in high school and she was a fantastic teacher and I just happened to be watching MASH at the time, so I was on MASH. Loved it. I just I felt like I wanted to grow up to be Alan Alda. I wanted to be Hawkeye.

Speaker 2 4:54

I wanted to be a surgeon.

Speaker 1 4:56

So at that point it led me to taking physics because I was like well, if I'm gonna be a surgeon, I have to school, I'm going to have to take physics, I'll have to do all these classes. So I was taking all the basics the anatomy, the biology, the physics and physics was tough and we had to do a job shadow for that class and she wanted us to shadow an engineer and we had all year to do this project and I pretty much waited until the last month of the school year and I realized you know what? I don't like physics and I don't want to be an engineer. So I told her that she's like well, that's fine, you know what? I know you don't like physics at this point. It's fine, you've been a good student, we've had fun, but you're not an engineer, you're never going to be one.

Speaker 1 5:37

So how about you find something? So I talked to a few doctors and they said they'd love to have me shadow, but I had to be 18. And I was still 17 at the time. So at that point I kind of just waited, procrastinated, and all of a sudden I had a week left to get the project done.

Speaker 1 5:54

I was talking to my mom about this, saying, mom, I don't know what I'm going to do, and she just brought it up at work and she was a school nurse at the time and she had actually her school nurse that she was partnered with was Laura Kramer, and my mom said well, laura said you could do a job shadow with Tom over at the funeral home. And I said, oh, I don't want to do a job shadow at a funeral home. That's weird, that's, I don't want to do that for a 17 year old boy right exactly.

Speaker 1 6:21

So then you know what I guess I have to. So I went there and I shadowed with Tom and Greg for maybe an hour and a half and he offered me a job for the summer that day and went home and I talked to my dad about it and I was like he's like, well, you can if you want, otherwise you're gonna be picking rock all summer. I was like you know what Air conditioning, working on the computer, painting, mowing I think I'll try that this summer rather than rock picking. So I worked that summer with Tom and Greg and it was great. I had a good time there, decided that's what I wanted to go into and kind of just made it my plans back then to come back to Trimont, always planning to run funeral homes kind of in the Trimont Welcome Sherbourne area. So then I went to school at the University of Minnesota, did the program there. It was a four-year program. Thanks to the PSEO classes at Martin County West I was able to knock a year off of there, which was great, oh good for you.

Speaker 1 7:11

Yeah, my fourth year would have been COVID, so that would have been all online classes.

Speaker 2 7:15

Yeah, Not to mention the expense of school.

Speaker 1 7:17

Well, exactly, yeah. So I mean I saved an entire year's tuition years of exactly bored and didn't have to do online school that I'm paying for, yeah, full physical school, right. Um, then I, after that I did my internship over in winona, went out to wisconsin for a while, um, and I never planned on going to wisconsin, but I met my wife I gotta say that where you met, crystal.

Speaker 1 7:37

I met crystal at my cousin's wedding. Uh, so jake sin is my cousin. He married becca steen at their wedding. We met and just hit it off, so ended up following Crystal out to California. She was in California at the time, went out there and visited a few times and then COVID happened and she moved back. We thought temporarily, because COVID was only going to be two weeks.

Speaker 2 7:58

Yeah right, yeah, right, that's all. Lower the curve, exactly.

Speaker 1 8:02

So then she came back here. All of her stuff was in California yet. But then we decided you know what, we're going to move to Wisconsin. So we had all of her stuff packed up out there, shipped here. She never even went back to her apartment. And then I went to Wisconsin, got my license over there, worked for a few years and then it was around the time that we were planning on coming back to Trimont. Anyways and a lot of people know things changed a little bit from what we were originally expecting, but we still persevered anyways and made the plans to come to Trimont, moved back to town, didn't really know what we were going to do, and then ended up finding the Methodist Church to purchase. So then we started that process, renovated that whole building.

Speaker 2 8:42

Well, that has ended up beautiful.

Speaker 1 8:46

Oh, thank you, it's been a lot of work, oh.

Speaker 2 8:49

I know I came over a couple three times.

Speaker 1 8:52

Yeah, but it's been fun. I can't believe the Methodist Church is a little church that I grew up going to. I mean we used to share pastors and in my head, when I think of it from my childhood, it's just this little building.

Speaker 2 9:02

It had a nice ceiling.

Speaker 1 9:03

I remember that. But after we renovated it, I mean it's just a turnaround?

Speaker 2 9:08

Oh, it is a turnaround.

Speaker 1 9:09

And the amount of stuff we've used it for in the community. Just so many different events.

Speaker 2 9:14

That's kind of your plan, isn't it?

Speaker 1 9:15

Yeah, yeah for all three of our locations. I mean people need a space that's big enough to gather and is affordable and makes things more comfortable for families for so many different settings.

Speaker 2 9:26

Yeah, and it's smart. It's smart You're giving a whole new meaning to the word funeral home, absolutely, you know. I mean, I think in ways it's really smart on your part because people are comfortable now going to a funeral home. Yeah, that's not just for a funeral.

Speaker 1 9:41

Exactly that's what we're trying to do. I mean, it's not something I've really encountered before. Obviously, you want people to be comfortable when you walk into your funeral home, but for the most part, for 100 years, I mean, that's meant big, thick floral carpets, make it feel like it's a grandma's house, kind of thing like that, and you whisper when you go in yeah, you whisper when you go in.

Speaker 2 10:00

It's got to be quiet and I don't know why, but you do, yeah, and I don't know.

Speaker 1 10:04

Ours is just people walk in the building. At all three locations they say this just doesn't feel like a funeral home, right? You walk in and there's the music that the person who died loved. I mean they can have country playing over the radio inside or they can have whatever they like.

Building Multiple Funeral Home Locations

Speaker 2 10:25

I did a funeral maybe a year ago I think it was maybe a year and a half and they chose one of their songs, stairway to Heaven, and I was like huh hadn't done that before at a funeral. But then I thought you know, this is a great story. It wrote its own sermon, stairway to Heaven. So I've always found that fascinating. Some of the music that people pick used to always be, though we go to the garden alone or Amazing Grace, or Rock of Ages, or Old Calvary or what it's called Old Rugged Cross.

Speaker 1 10:54

It's changed up a little bit. Those are all great songs. I don't have a problem with them, but some people they have emotions tied to those things where they think I don't want to be that sad. I want to have something that reminds me of my mom or my dad or my husband or my wife, that I'll remember and I'll think fondly of down the road.

Speaker 2 11:11

Well, it's in your title, of your name, of your business. Family Celebration. Yes absolutely, you know, and if the person is a Christian it is a celebration. Otherwise it may not be, but you know, so I like it. I like the whole concept, the whole idea, yeah and that's kind of the point.

Speaker 1 11:33

People like being able to come to a place that they've been before, at least for local people. No-transcript.

Speaker 2 11:52

And then you've got, of course, excuse me, you've got, of course, Welcome location?

Speaker 1 11:56

Yep, so we rent St Paul's Community Church over in Welcome, okay, beautiful building. They were formerly UCC and went non-denominational, so right now they've got a great group of kind of cycling pastors that come through and do a week at a time. We actually that happened because we had their pastor passed away and we had his funeral. That would be Pastor Wayne Fritzinger, passed away back in January of 24. So we did his funeral and we were there at the building and I was like Craig, this building is just too good. He's like, yeah, someday this could be your funeral home, if things ever change here.

Speaker 2 12:28

And I was like well, why are we waiting?

Speaker 1 12:32

I think it would work. I said I can rent the building from you guys, give you some extra income, get some people in the doors. We'll use it for a community space, just like we do in Trimont. It took some time, obviously, took some time. Obviously the state's slow with licensing things. The city of Wellcome was great, the county was great, all that stuff. But I think that process started in January, the discussion. We finally got that licensed in October. It's not that bad. Yeah, it's not that bad.

Speaker 2 12:53

I mean you know, then you bought the Congregational Church in Tremont. Absolutely yeah, In Sherbourne I mean, where am I at, yeah, sherbourne. I mean, where am I at, yeah, sherbourne, it's your church, you should know. You would think, wouldn't you? Yeah, in Sherbourne. And that started in July.

Speaker 1 13:12

Yeah, yeah, we started talking about it back then and at first it was oh no, we don't want to do this, yeah, we're not ready to do that.

Speaker 2 13:16

And all of a sudden, one day I got the call that said hey, do you want to come to a board meeting?

Speaker 1 13:21

a half plan.

Speaker 2 13:21

Yeah, right, yeah, isn't that something yeah?

Speaker 1 13:24

I know I did not. I thought you know what We'll have Trimont, we're going to get this all nice and settled, and a few years from now maybe we'll venture into Sherbourne and then Welcome and then boom boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We've got the three that we wanted. Well, that's good.

Speaker 1 13:41

Absolutely We'd like to do. People loved our bingo event that we did in Trimont. I want to do one in Trimont, one in Sherbourne Welcome. I think we're actually planning to do during the summer, during the festival, like right after the parade. There's kind of an empty time, so I think we're going to fill it with air-conditioned bingo for an hour and a half.

Speaker 2 13:59

Oh, bingo goes over big. Yeah, yes, yeah, once you take away.

Speaker 1 14:11

and that's the thing with TriMod, is it's so flexible? I mean, you have the sanctuary and fellowship all right next to each other. There's no pews, so there's whatever we want to do we can have it.

Speaker 2 14:22

Yeah, it's like one big open room, exactly.

Speaker 1 14:24

Yeah, for bingo we had 165 people.

Speaker 2 14:29

Oh, I was going to say you probably see about a couple hundred, don't you?

Speaker 1 14:31

Yeah, we got 200 chairs and we had Christian Nelson, the fire chief, come in and he said yeah, your capacity is kind of however many chairs you have, because you're safe on exits and everything Okay. So I mean because we've got such good fire exits and alarms and everything, we have 200 chairs so we can seat 200 people 200 people yeah, it seems to work out well.

Speaker 2 14:49

Yeah Well, sundays in the park if it's bad weather they come to your place now, right?

Speaker 1 14:53

Yep, absolutely so. Darwin, anthony and Karen Coder handed over the reins to Sundays in the park to me last year after I had gotten involved by just suggesting that if there's a rain delay, rather than going to the school, we come over to the funeral home. It worked out great. We did it twice last year.

Speaker 2 15:07

It's a lot more comfortable.

Speaker 1 15:08

It is, and you don't have to bring your own chair to that.

Speaker 2 15:10

That's what I mean. It's a lot more comfortable at your place, you know, and then sometimes in the summer it's a little warm outside it is, but it's okay.

Speaker 1 15:17

Yeah, I think for Glenn Hendrickson. It rained the day that he was playing, so we moved his to the funeral home. That was the first.

Speaker 2 15:26

Seemed like always, at least once a year.

Speaker 1 15:28

Yes, yeah, and then the Fett brothers. We moved just because it was too hot.

Speaker 2 15:31

Yeah, yeah, so it was probably 90 degrees. Oh, they probably loved that, oh yeah, that was great.

Speaker 1 15:36

Ice cream was all going to melt out there. Oh, I know.

Speaker 2 15:39

I know when we first moved here I saw that sign the very first time. I said Sunday's in the park and I thought wait a minute, that's spelled like Ice Cream Sunday.

Speaker 1 15:49

Yep, it is, it's fun that started, oh, I think, about 25 years ago. It was for the Centennial.

Speaker 2 15:53

Oh, okay, yeah, no, it is fun though you go and you listen and you just sit back and take it easy and you have some ice cream, absolutely In words right now I'm working on getting the gazebo kind of spruced up for the year. Yeah.

Speaker 1 16:07

I had the city down there called up to Kelly and she talked with Jason and Ryan and they came down and power washed the building for me, so I'm planning on going and repainting the decking and then repainting the metal.

Speaker 2 16:18

Want to power wash my place? Yeah, maybe Give them a call.

Speaker 1 16:21

There's actually an Oriole on top of the building. They're just a little bird on a. Oh really, maybe it's not. It's a directional like wind marker up top and it's just looked like a bird up top. And somebody the other day just randomly said you know, that thing used to be orange. It was painted black and orange like an Oreo. I was like, oh really. So I got some orange paint. It's going to be an Oreo. It's going to be an Oreo.

Speaker 2 16:43

That sounds great. Yeah, All right. So we've covered that. Let me see I'm not about most of the stuff. So what's the plan going forward?

Speaker 1 16:54

I mean you said you have a 10-year plan 10-year plan was to get buildings and trim it, and that's it. So you're already there, we're already there, so now it's just work until retirement. Absolutely yeah, Grow the business, get people more and more comfortable with using a new place in town. But I'd say we're there. I mean, I didn't expect to have served the amount of families we have by this point already and it's just an honor to know that they place that trust in us no matter when and where they call.

Family Celebrations and Community Events

Speaker 2 17:19

This is May and you've already done quite a few funerals. You've done as many as you did last year already.

Speaker 1 17:24

We have yeah, okay, I know that's not something I don't know.

Speaker 2 17:31

It's not something like you're rooting for.

Speaker 1 17:32

But you are just happy when people call that they choose to call you, and that's the part that we feel honored for.

Speaker 2 17:37

It's just great to have that. Tell me how it works pre-planning.

Speaker 1 17:42

Yeah. So pre-planning is something that happens in funeral homes and some people might be familiar with it, but a lot of people aren't. They think, oh, that's only what you can do when you're going to die. But we've kind of turned that on its head here at our funeral home we do educational seminars where we have pizza and pre-planning. We're actually doing one June 12th over in Sherbourne at the new funeral home there.

Speaker 2 18:02

Oh good.

Speaker 1 18:03

So 6 o'clock, june 12th, pizza and pre-planning.

Speaker 2 18:06

June 12th. What day of the week is that?

Speaker 1 18:07

Thursday, Thursday, okay, oh good, that's a good night. Yeah, it's a great night. People, it doesn't usually get in the way of too many plans on a Thursday, right right, but that's an event where we just kind of give you the basics on like what pre-planning is. We have Brandon Edmondson, the lawyer over from Fairmont, come over and they just kind of tell you things to prepare ahead of time for your estates and things like that. So that's what we do with the seminars.

Speaker 2 18:32

Okay, so it's not just about your funeral, but it's the whole process.

Speaker 1 18:36

Yeah, absolutely. I mean. The seminars are basically about protecting your assets for your family. Oh, okay, he'll walk you through on the way to keep your money yours.

Speaker 2 18:46

And then yeah, because you can lose a huge amount, you can yep or your heirs.

Speaker 1 18:52

Exactly, and it's not. People might say, oh, you're dodging taxes. It's no. You're being prepared with the lawyer who has all the knowledge on this stuff, to make sure that you're doing things the right way.

Speaker 2 19:00

Well, I always feel like you know I've already paid the taxes on that money. Once I know I'd like to be able to leave it to my kids and not have to they end up with 10% of what I'd worked hard to get to Well, absolutely, and that's what he's there to help with. And lawyers like him and there's no fee.

Speaker 1 19:15

No, this is free. So we pay for the event to bring people in to show them the building, kind of introduce them to us and also just give them insight into how to do this. And we also have Christy Swenson from Edward Jones coming over just for some financial insight.

Speaker 2 19:31

Christ, he's a brand new sponsor for us.

Speaker 1 19:32

I saw that, yeah her and Mandy are in there.

Speaker 2 19:34

Yeah, they share a column a week now, june 12th. What time did you say again? 6 o'clock, 6, okay. So come hungry you're going to have pizza Come hungry, we're going to have pizza from Green Mill. They bring it over, oh, from Green Mill yeah.

Speaker 1 19:45

We had two in Tremont right when we opened. I remember that we had 60 people right away, which was fantastic.

Speaker 2 19:51

Oh, that's good.

Speaker 1 19:52

Getting people to look forward to going to a funeral home is a tough thing to do.

Speaker 2 19:57

They get scared, don't they? Yeah, because it feels like, oh, I'm tempting fate, I know, and you're not. No, absolutely not.

Speaker 1 20:06

And then I think we did just a single one over in Welcome, and we had 45 people at that one. So these are great turnouts. I'm not expecting about the same for Sherbourne. We've got room in there for 100.

Speaker 2 20:16

It's a beautiful fellowship hall. Beautiful fellowship hall. That's got the best kitchen ever, though, does it not?

Speaker 1 20:24

It's an incredible kitchen. It's a nice kitchen, all that space. We'll be able to set a lot of pizzas out that night.

Speaker 2 20:30

I bet you will.

Speaker 1 20:32

How long does it run? We'll be able to set a lot of pizzas out that night. I bet you will. I bet you will. How long does it run? We usually say like 90 minutes is kind of the max.

Speaker 2 20:38

So an hour and a half. So an hour and a half yeah.

Speaker 1 20:40

And it's usually done before that. We just want to budget the time. Sometimes question and answers run long. People have things that popped up they have things that they came in person. So like more of a one-on-one meeting. People pre-plan in a lot of different ways. I mean, it's not, like I said earlier, like when people think of pre-planning they might think, oh, I have to be ready to die to pre-plan.

Speaker 2 21:05

Right, I was thinking your music and your scripture you want yeah?

Pre-Planning Funerals and Seminars

Speaker 1 21:08

And we do as much or as little as people want. So what I do is we've got a pre-planning guide, we walk them through, we get to know the people more, and sometimes it's people I've never met before and sometimes it's people I've known since I was three and part of it is just hearing what they want, hearing what they're looking for. A lot of times it's hearing what they don't want saying I've seen this for years. I don't want it done this way and I just say, well, I'll put the notes down, we're not going to do it that way, but we'll do as much as write a full obituary for somebody who's 60 years old and might have 40 years left. It's just. I mean, it's kind of nice. They know that their kids aren't going to have to guess on the dates, like one of the things is when did mom graduate high school?

Speaker 1 21:48

oh my gosh yeah, that's tough to know off the top of your head if you don't have it down. So we do that, if we do like a cost estimate, like on, if the funeral were today, this is what it would cost, as thorough as it can be, and that's flowers, that's obituaries, that's merchandise, that's services, that's the full thing. Yeah, so we want to show like, if they choose, can you lock that cost? In yes you actually can with our funeral.

Speaker 2 22:14

So seriously, if I did a, set up a funeral for a 45 year old, they don't die for 45 years. They still have that same price.

Speaker 1 22:21

Yeah, I can't, that's a, that's a, that's a loser right there for you. Well so the way it works is the money doesn't go to the funeral home. So when you set the money aside it goes into an insurance policy and if we do, it's optional to lock the price in. So I give you that estimate. You pay just the estimate. It's going to grow like an insurance policy.

Speaker 2 22:42

So that's going to grow 3% to 5%, depending on.

Speaker 1 22:46

So that covers that, it covers a good chunk, but if you choose the way that, it might potentially be a loser for me and better for the person planning they can pay an additional 10% on top of the contract. They can lock in their price for life and that means that if they live another 45 years, like you, said and my prices have raised due to inflation, due to things like tariffs on caskets.

Speaker 2 23:09

I mean, that's a real thing baskets.

Speaker 1 23:16

I mean, that's a real thing. I would basically take the value of the original policy divided by the growth on the policy, and that's kind of the percentage that we work with against the final amount, and then if my prices are lower than I, discount down. So it's a way that people can be comfortable that they locked in what they wanted for life.

Speaker 2 23:31

But that's a good deal, yeah, I mean, honestly, funeral homes.

Speaker 1 23:35

They used to be standard, that's what it was. You pre-planned, that's what happened. But then when prices kept rising and everything, funeral homes slowly stopped having that as an option. So most of Iowa I think a lot of Iowa funeral homes still do guarantee, not many in Wisconsin, hardly any in Minnesota. So we're pretty much the only one locally that will guarantee costs. Okay, well, that's a good deal for you know it is and we've done it for people. And sometimes people say you know what, we just want to do it. We'll see, we'll play the growth. I don't want to put the extra 10% and that's fine. I said the most important part is writing it down Right.

Speaker 1 24:14

Making sure your kids know where you want to go, and to us, as a new funeral home, I want to make sure people don't have it on their file from 10 years ago that they're going to go to another funeral home and they end up there and then there's just confusion. So it's making sure your kids know and you know and your spouse knows.

Speaker 2 24:30

Okay, well, that's a good plan. Yeah, yeah, okay, well, that's a good plan. Yeah, what was I going to ask you? I?

Speaker 1 24:36

got that covered.

Speaker 2 24:37

You got all that covered so what was I going to say? Tell me a little more about. Oh, I know who it was. It finally hit me Is cremation. Is that becoming more and more popular?

Speaker 1 24:50

Yeah, yeah, cremation has definitely grown over the years. I mean, when I was in school, it doesn't really change that much. But you look back 20, 30 years, it's doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

Speaker 2 25:03

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 25:04

I mean, if you look back, it was pretty taboo for a long time.

Speaker 2 25:08

It didn't need to be, but it was just something that people didn't agree with.

Speaker 1 25:13

So they were unsure about it. They didn't know what it was. It's really, it's a form of disposition. So Minnesota views cremation as final disposition. So once that has happened, you can do everything with the cremated remains that you would do with the traditional burial, with the body in a casket. I mean you can still have the funeral, you can still have the visitation. It doesn't change any of those ritual aspects. I mean the things that the family needs. It's still all there. So people choose it for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 1 25:41

I mean there's flexibility of when you can have the funeral even though with the traditional burial you might be able to wait a month or two. There's kind of a deadline on how soon you could have an open casket. Still With cremation, you can have that funeral six months later, and a lot of people choose to do that. There's different ways to look at it. I mean, part of it is it's nice to do it when everybody's available, but another part is it's kind of tough on families to wait that long to do this. It is, it is so even with cremation it is still nicer for families.

Speaker 2 26:16

And financially it's probably savings financially if people are strapped a little bit.

Speaker 1 26:22

Yeah, absolutely, and that's just because of the different costs on things. So I mean our goal opening up was we got the total crem. You can have a nice casket that's at a lower cost. You could have a nice vault that's at a lower cost and you could get closer to what the cost of a cremation service would be. So, yeah, cremation overall still would be cheaper. But from the funeral homes aspect and this goes for me, it goes for other funeral homes A lot of times what we charge isn't changing very much. It's more on family selection. So if somebody says a funeral costs $8,000 or somebody later says it costs $12,000 for cremation funeral, that's going to be more. So like, well, this person had a $2,500 funeral meal versus this person had $300 in sandwiches. So I mean it's still a nice gathering for the families, but things like that affect the overall total price Right, so okay, okay, all right.

Speaker 2 27:34

So if they want to contact you, how do we do that?

Speaker 1 27:37

Yeah, you can call us at 507-639-5711. If you just want to hear a little bit more, maybe, talk about pre-planning. Learn about what we do. We'd love to sit down with you either in Trimont. Wellcome Sherbourne. We do a lot of house visits. I mean, we're willing to come do the prearrangements at your home and there's no cost? No, no cost to that. No, yeah, pre-planning is absolutely free for us to come meet with you.

Speaker 1 28:00

Okay, no pressure, no, no pressure. We're not going to say like, hey, you need to get this done. We're going to say, hey, this is what we have. It's your choice on how fast you want to work.

Speaker 2 28:10

It's probably a good plan for people, especially even for young couples who have a child or two, you know.

Speaker 1 28:17

Yeah, and you know, with preplanning, sometimes we have a first meeting with somebody in March and maybe we'll get back together with them next March. Yeah, I mean we might sometimes the second week.

Speaker 1 28:28

The second meeting where we go over obituary details and costs might be next week, or they might decide they'll call back when they're ready and all of a sudden it's Tuesday at eight in the morning and they say, hey, we want to get together with you at 11. And, like they want to, when they want to do it, they want to do it and we're flexible with that. Good, good, good. But, yeah, we've got a website with a lot of great resources. We have all of our pricing online, which is something a lot of funeral homes do.

Speaker 1 28:53

Yeah, yeah, something Crystal and I were very passionate about with our funeral home is we want to be transparent. We want to be honest. We want to make sure people, if they want to ask all these questions at two in the morning when they're up thinking about it, they can cruise our website, they can find prices, they can see all the merchandise, they can see all of our policies, things that we do. We want people to have as much knowledge on their own personal choices as they can. So we've got all those pre-planning resources, a lot of grief resources, on our website. All the merchandise on there there's plenty to go off of on our website.

Speaker 2 29:22

Well, my mother is 90 and a half years old.

Cremation Trends and Financial Considerations

Speaker 2 29:25

In fact, last Friday was her one half year birthday. So Candy and I went out and got her a half a cake. The people at Ivy made it for us and they decorated it. It was beautiful. We took it to her. But my point was going to be, as mom's got a couple of insurance policies and so we've been kind of thinking, okay, do we have enough? Will she be covered? So now I can go online and take a look at that and kind of plan it in advance, which is a good idea, which is what you're talking about, of course.

Speaker 2 29:55

Exactly, yep, but I don't have to come to you to see some prices to get an idea.

Speaker 1 29:59

Exactly and that's what I like. I mean a lot of times funeral homes that I've even worked for in the past. They kind of are guarded about their prices. They want you in the door to talk about pricing. If you want to look at it at your house, that's totally fine. I'll answer all the questions on the phone, where you feel like there's less pressure.

Speaker 1 30:12

That's not my goal is to ever tell somebody they have to use us, so we just want to have all the information available. Another thing that people need to know about pre-planning is that you can switch from any funeral home to any funeral home, so funeral policies that you might have planned with somebody else last year.

Speaker 2 30:31

Or you may have lived someplace else, or you may have lived someplace else.

Speaker 1 30:33

Yeah, we've transferred policies from funeral homes. I think even 30 to 40 at this point people that have chosen you know what now that you're open, I really like what you're offering. Or maybe you're more affordable than the one that we set up with Lots offering, or maybe you're more affordable than the one that we set up with Lots of reasons, but it's a very simple process. We've moved policies over very easily, and the same thing if people want to move policies from our funeral home to another.

Speaker 1 30:55

It's not something we get in the way of.

Speaker 2 30:57

Well, they may move and life happens.

Speaker 1 30:59

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 31:04

Mom goes to a nursing home in another state or another town and the kids are going. No, we're not going back to Trimont when mom passes away, or whatever, yeah, and that's the money is there.

Speaker 1 31:10

It's that the funeral home does not own the money. That's money that's owned by the individual.

Speaker 2 31:14

By yeah, right, yeah, it's just, it's just part there, exactly yeah.

Speaker 1 31:17

But in the same way, if somebody dies in but they still want to have their funeral here in Trimont or Sherbourne, welcome.

Speaker 2 31:26

And we see that a lot. Yeah, you see that a lot.

Speaker 1 31:27

You don't have to call the funeral home in Duluth, you call the funeral home in Trimont. You call us and we will coordinate everything. Get mom, dad, your loved one, back here and take care of all of that, Because really when we meet with families, the goal is to take everything off of their plate that they don't want to deal with. I mean, we'll do everything as far as ordering the flowers, ordering the food, all that stuff.

Speaker 2 31:49

Oh, you take care of all that.

Speaker 1 31:50

Yeah, so everything goes on one bill, so the family doesn't have to pay.

Speaker 2 31:54

Oh, that's nice yeah.

Speaker 1 31:55

Well, I mean, you think of all the checks that get written out the day of a funeral to make it happen.

Speaker 2 31:59

I can imagine I never pay attention to that.

Speaker 1 32:01

Yeah, I mean, you pay the pastors, you pay the organists, you pay the soloists. You pay the caters, you pay the grave digger, you pay the cemetery. Oh yeah, you pay the newspaper, you pay the radio all these things, yeah, and that's just something. If the family has to do all of that, it's more on their plate.

Speaker 2 32:17

Well, and it's a time in their life when that is not what they want to think about.

Speaker 1 32:21

Absolutely so. Like for the most part families after they leave arrangements at our funeral home. We've got the obituary taken care of. We get it posted right away, because I don't want people waiting to see like, oh well, when's this going to be. So we get that done. For the most part, families just have to work on putting pictures together for a video slideshow and that's a fun project to do.

Speaker 2 32:40

It is, it is.

Speaker 1 32:41

They all dig through the old pictures you know, and we have a link that we send so they can text them off their phones. We can scan in pictures for everybody. It's really it's an easy process.

Speaker 2 32:49

Oh, it's so much nicer than it used to be. My goodness, yep, yeah, yeah. When I die, the kids are going to send about 4,000 pictures. Maybe they won't.

Speaker 1 33:01

Yeah, I'm sure that's it used to be. I had to say at other funerals I worked at, they'd say, all right, we can do 50 pictures. Oh, like, we can only take 50. Oh, okay. And then, like when I own my own business and I'm like not within their rules anymore, I'm looking at it and it's like there's no like picture limit. I can put as many as I want on here. So I just say okay, so I don't know. And sometimes we 400 pictures on there and it's a long video. But you know what If it's going on in the background?

Speaker 1 33:25

Exactly, exactly and there are people there who maybe haven't?

Speaker 2 33:31

seen some of those pictures because they're not around on a regular basis.

Speaker 1 33:33

Yeah, exactly, and at all three of our locations. I mean, when you're at the visitation, you can watch the video. You can watch it on our website, you can watch it during the reception, and that's really like when you want the videos, you want to be able to sit there and eat your ham sandwich, or across from your cousin or whomever, and then you look at grandma. You might not be watching the pictures the whole time.

Contacting Sinn Funeral Home

Speaker 2 33:52

You might be talking, but when you see that one where somebody's doing something crazy, you're like oh, I remember that it's pretty cool. Yeah, it is, yeah, all right. Last thoughts um, yeah, you look through your notes there. You haven't needed them, have you? I haven't needed them no.

Speaker 1 34:09

I covered everything. Yeah, I thought you did too.

Speaker 2 34:11

Give us the phone number one more time and your website address.

Speaker 1 34:14

Well, I guess another thing we didn't talk about as much was the community events. So we've hosted so many different things, and if it's a fundraiser or something like that, we really don't have charges for that. We want people to use the space for whatever they can think of. So I've got a huge list of things we've done. I'm not going to read it all here, but it's always just call us and ask If you think there's an idea that you'd like to do in a space that you don't have that isn't big enough.

Speaker 2 34:42

We've You're kind of an event center for TriMont.

Speaker 1 34:45

We kind of are. Yeah, look, you're kind of an event center for Trimont. We kind of are yeah, look at that, trimont, we haven't been there, trimont, sherbourne welcome, there's just that quilting group, the Beats and Sherbourne. They're going to keep doing that. We've had anniversary parties, bridal showers, birthday parties. We've got four graduation parties in Trimont this year. I was going to advertise that and I thought you know what? We'll wait a year, I mean, I think, graduation parties would be great.

Speaker 2 35:10

That was a good idea.

Speaker 1 35:11

the graduation party, yeah at all three of the locations. I mean Trimont, wellcome and Sherbrooke. That'd be perfect.

Speaker 2 35:16

Yeah.

Speaker 1 35:17

A lot of people. One thing we didn't talk about also is so many people don't have a church now.

Speaker 2 35:22

Right.

Speaker 1 35:22

So what's nice about our funeral home is that you can still have a funeral there, still have the space and the traditional feel of a church, with the flexibility that you might expect not having gone to a church.

Speaker 2 35:34

Right, you know.

Speaker 1 35:35

Right, right. So some people think, well, I don't know where I'm going to have a funeral because I don't have a church. Right, yeah, but yeah, just a lot of different reasons to use our building. Yeah, but yeah, just a lot of different reasons to use our building. So, if you have… your website, website, so on the website that would be wwwsinfuneralhomecom.

Speaker 2 35:54

S-I-N-N.

Speaker 1 35:54

S-I-N-N. North north. Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 35:58

Phone number is 507-639-5711.

Speaker 1 36:02

And you can check out our Facebook page as well. We have a pretty active Facebook page. Post a lot of our updates and events on there. Cool.

Speaker 2 36:10

Ian, it's been nice having you here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Next time bring Crystal, probably, should she's working today. She works for.

Speaker 1 36:16

Midwest Dairy now oh she does.

Speaker 2 36:18

Yeah, it's like a checkoff program. Where's that?

Speaker 1 36:20

at Headquarters in St Paul, but it's mostly remote work, so she's here and travels.

Speaker 2 36:25

I was going to say I don't know where this is, yeah.

Speaker 1 36:28

Okay, she grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin.

Speaker 2 36:31

Oh, she did. Of course she did. Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 36:33

Everybody grew up on a dairy farm when we moved here. She was selling cheese, so that was fun because we'd always have cheese in the fridge, which was great. I bet you did. But yeah, now she's with Midas Dairy. She loves it. Good Helps out when she can at the funeral home, more of like the helping me make decisions. Sure, she's not there day to day, but I definitely need her.

Speaker 2 36:55

But she will be one day Absolutely. Maybe that's the plan, I'm guessing anyway.

Speaker 1 37:00

You know what she's got? A in the dairy industry oh good for her. Marvin might be there full time before Christmas.

Speaker 2 37:05

He may be, he might be. We'll start him out mowing the lawn.

Speaker 1 37:08

Exactly.

Speaker 2 37:09

He'll be moving flowers around. That's right.

Speaker 1 37:12

Breaking vases in no time.

Speaker 2 37:14

About four years. Yeah Well, it's been nice having you Absolutely. I appreciate you being here. All right, folks, that's it. That's it.