Money, in brief

The price of dying climbing

A basic funeral in England cost about 4,285 pounds in 2025, up 3.5% in a year. [4] Hull City Council has started selling its own funerals from 850 pounds to undercut that. [5] In China, funerals cost close to half the average annual salary in 2020. [7]

Rules promised, not written

England still has no licence for funeral directors, and the UK government says only that it is committed to acting. [2] China's market regulator has set new funeral industry rules to tackle pricing fraud. [7] Human composting remains illegal in the UK while a Law Commission review sits unpublished. [9]

Loan terms changed after signing

The US Congress rewrote repayment rules for people who had been repaying for over a decade. [15] The SAVE plan ended on 1 July and about seven million borrowers were given 90 days to choose again. [20][16] Debt forgiven from January 2026 is taxed as income, which it was not the month before. [22]

Money taken before you can argue

A US tax levy freezes a bank account from the moment it is served, with 21 days to sort it out. [38] A payday lender can keep debiting an account until the borrower formally revokes permission. [39] Capital One shut hundreds of Trump Organization accounts after an internal review, and the courts are still arguing about why. [28]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Money too.

• Nobody is obliged to tell youBuilding ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1A Hull funeral director admitted 67 offences. In England, nobody needs a qualification to handle a dead body.
2. 2Two Gosport funeral directors jailed
3. 3Chicago coroners identify decomposing bodies
4. 4What a funeral costs in England now
5. 5One in five regret the cheapest option

The UK government says it will act on licensing but has named no date.

Watch whether a bill appears in the next session of parliament.

Licensing would mostly help them. [2]

Also seen in Climate, Cyber and Tech.

Richard Elkin, 49, and Hayley Bell, 42, were jailed for four years after keeping 46 bodies in unrefrigerated conditions at their funeral home in Gosport, on England's south coast. [2]

Photographs released by prosecutors showed a mouldy wall, a filthy floor and chemical tubs stacked beside a trolley. [2]

Police and prosecutors said they had to work hard to traverse the complexity of the available legislation to secure convictions. [2]

It is the second English case in a year where the crime had to be assembled out of laws written for something else.

That is what having no licensing regime means in practice: the punishment arrives, but only after the harm.

Police found dozens of improperly stored corpses at South Chicago Chapel in July, and coroners worked overnight moving them out to begin identification. [3]

Records seen by CBS News described an unrefrigerated area with rodents and maggots. [3]

Illinois suspended the director's licence; her husband had already lost his in 2024, and a crematorium he ran was shut in 2025 after bodies were mishandled there. [3]

One woman said she no longer knows whether the ashes she was given are her sister's. [3]

The United States does license funeral directors, state by state, and this family had already lost one licence and one crematorium.

A licence catches people only if somebody is watching what they do next.

A basic funeral in England cost around 4,285 pounds in 2025, 3.5% more than the year before, according to a survey by the insurer SunLife. [4]

The same survey puts a simple burial at 4,758 pounds and a simple cremation at 3,518 pounds. [5] Funeral prices had been climbing quietly for years before that. [4]

The rise ran alongside sharp increases in the cost of fuel, food and travel. [4]

This is the number nearly everyone eventually pays and almost nobody compares. Cheaper options have spread fast against it, and Hull City Council now sells funerals of its own.

A direct cremation is one where nobody attends, and it is the cheapest funeral available. [4]

The National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors found nearly one in five people who arrange one later regret it, and one in five report unresolved grief. [4]

Ed Cullen, from Taunton in south-west England, said his mother arranged an unattended cremation because she thought it would save her family money and hassle. [4]

He was told she had made arrangements but not what kind, and never got to say goodbye. [4]

The saving is real and so is what it removes. A price comparison shows the first and cannot show the second, and the buyer usually finds out afterwards.

A funeral director arranges hundreds of funerals a year, and the family arranging one has never done it and never will again.

the same step: Ed Cullen's mother bought a direct cremation once, without knowing it removed the service, and there was no second purchase in which to learn

seven million borrowers get 90 days to pick a plan they will live with for decades, from a department that has run these plans for years

the bank reads a file on you at every account opening, and the customer meets that file once, usually after being refused

the step being broken on purpose: a published fixed price lets a first-time buyer borrow the knowledge they had no way to acquire

The pattern is about what the buyer can check, not about who is honest.

The nurse, the clerk, the plumber and the teacher all deal with people who are doing this for the first time, and all of them are first-timers somewhere else the same week.

Hull City Council has launched a website selling its own funerals, starting at 850 pounds, including a bereavement officer who makes all the arrangements. [5]

An attended cremation at its Chanterlands Crematorium costs 975 pounds. [5] Councillor Ted Dolman, who is responsible for the city's crematoria and cemeteries, said staff can also advise on financial help. [5]

The council set those prices against an average of 3,518 pounds for a simple cremation. [5]

A published fixed price is the one thing a first-time buyer can actually use.

Hull is the city where Legacy operated, which is why its council is the one doing this.

Most councils in Greater Manchester, in north-west England, charge higher burial fees for people who lived in another borough, and some charge non-residents double. [6]

Jen Dinelow paid about 1,000 pounds extra for her mother's grave at Gorton Cemetery because her parents had moved a mile across the boundary into Stockport. [6]

Sam Siddell was charged an extra 1,000 pounds to bury her father where he grew up, and again because she lives out of the area too. [6]

Families and funeral directors are campaigning for one flat fee across the ten boroughs. [6]

Bereaved families call it a tax on grief.

Manchester City Council says the higher fee protects limited grave space for local residents, which is a real constraint and not an answer to the bill.

Chinese families have been buying cheap empty flats and turning them into shrines holding a relative's ashes, a practice known locally as bone ash apartments. [7]

China's government has now banned it, days before Tomb Sweeping Day, when families tidy graves. [7]

A burial plot at one Beijing cemetery runs from about 10,000 to 200,000 yuan, and the lease has to be renewed every 20 years. [7]

Funerals cost close to half the average annual salary in 2020, and the market regulator has set new rules on funeral pricing fraud. [7]

People were not choosing flats over graves out of preference. They were doing it because property prices fell 40% from 2021 while plot prices did not.

Nearly two thirds of Americans now choose cremation, a share that has risen for five decades. [8]

A law scholar surveyed more than 1,500 US adults to find out whether people prefer cremation or are refusing burial for other reasons. [8]

Ranking six legal options, 51.7% of Gen Z respondents put casket burial first, against 27.1% of baby boomers. [8]

Green burial is legal in all 50 states but offered by only a small share of providers. [8]

Two thirds choosing cremation is being read as what people want.

The youngest group in the survey put the most expensive option first, which is not what a settled cultural shift looks like.

Human composting, also called terramation, seals a body in a vessel with straw, alfalfa and wood chips until it becomes soil. [9]

Kristoffer Hughes, a former mortuary technician who worked for coroners for three decades, wants to open the UK's first service. [9]

He visited Return Home near Seattle, the world's first large-scale facility, where the process takes 60 days and the soil goes back to the family. [9]

It is illegal in the UK, and a Law Commission review for the UK government is due to be published imminently. [9]

Whether a cheaper method exists at all is decided by a law review most people will never read.

Until it reports, the menu of things a UK family can choose stays as short as it is.

A typical gas cremation releases the equivalent of 125kg of carbon dioxide, according to the certifier PlanetMark. [10]

That includes methane, nitrous oxides and sulphur dioxide, and mercury tooth fillings are vaporised with everything else. [10]

It is roughly the pollution of driving a pickup truck from Melbourne to Canberra. [10]

Around three quarters of Australians are cremated, which makes it the most common method and arguably the most damaging. [10]

Cremation spread because it is cheaper and simpler, not because anyone weighed this.

It is the same pattern as the direct cremation regret: the number on the invoice moved first and everything else followed.

Burial insurance, also sold as final expense insurance, is a small life policy meant to cover a funeral rather than a mortgage. [11]

Cover typically starts at 1,000 dollars and tops out around 50,000. [11]

Insurers issue it between about ages 45 and 80 and usually skip the full medical examination, which is why it is sold to older and sicker buyers who cannot get ordinary life cover. [11][12]

The money can be spent on anything, including legal fees, unpaid hospital bills or a small inheritance. [12]

It exists because the funeral bill lands days after a death and most estates take months to release money. What it is really buying is timing, not cover.

US workplace retirement plans, known as 401(k)s, may allow a hardship withdrawal before retirement, and funeral expenses are on the list of qualifying reasons alongside medical bills and tuition. [13]

The tax office warns that the money is taxed as income if it was never taxed going in. [13]

Anyone under 59 and a half may owe a further 10% on top. [13] Some plans then bar the worker from paying anything in for six months. [13]

A funeral is one of the few bills that cannot wait, so it is one of the few that reaches retirement savings.

The penalty and the six-month freeze are paid years later by the same person.

SAVE was a US student loan repayment plan launched in 2023 and billed as the most affordable ever, before several states sued and courts blocked it. [20]

It formally ended on 1 July 2026, after the roughly seven million borrowers in it had spent years in a legal limbo where no payments were due. [16][20]

Interest has been building since August 2025, and none of that waiting counted towards forgiveness. [20]

Borrowers get 90 days from their notice to pick a new plan or be moved into a standard one automatically, alongside new borrowing limits for some students. [20][16][14]

Seven million people were told to choose again, on a clock, about a debt that will run for decades.

The default, if they do nothing, is the plan with the higher monthly payment.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act did not only change the rules for new US borrowers; it swept in people who had been repaying for years. [15]

Matthew Hansen, a 40-year-old pharmacist in Sandy, Utah, borrowed 166,000 dollars for graduate school and joined the Pay As You Earn plan in 2013, paying 10% of his spare income for 20 years. [15]

That plan disappears from the menu in summer 2028, pushing him onto worse terms. [15] He compared it to a mortgage lender adding five years and 100,000 dollars to a loan. [15]

A commercial lender doing this would be accused of breaking the contract.

Because the lender is a government that also writes the rules, borrowers' legal position is not clear at all.

The Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, was created by the same law and runs for 30 years before any balance is written off. [18]

Payments are 1% to 10% of yearly income depending on earnings, cut by 50 dollars for each dependent, with a 10 dollar floor for anyone earning under 10,000 dollars. [18]

If the payment is smaller than the month's interest, the rest of that interest is cancelled rather than added on. [18]

If the payment does not cut the balance by at least 50 dollars, a subsidy covers the rest of that 50 dollars. [18]

It stops balances growing while someone is paying, which older plans did not. It also takes ten more years to reach forgiveness than the plan it replaces.

The old US standard plan repaid a federal loan over a flat ten years, and servicers put borrowers into it by default. [19]

From 1 July 2026 there is a second version, the Tiered Standard Plan, which runs 10, 15, 20 or 25 years depending on how much is outstanding. [19]

It applies to anyone who takes out or consolidates a federal loan on or after that date. [19]

Taking a single new loan, or consolidating old ones, moves all of a borrower's loans across. [19]

One new loan silently rewrites the terms of every older loan a person holds.

That is the kind of trigger nobody reads for, because it is not in the paperwork for the loan being signed.

US borrowers who took loans before 1 July 2026 can still pick from several income-linked plans, but after 2028 only two survive: income-based repayment and RAP. [16]

Pay As You Earn and Income-Contingent Repayment both disappear. [16] Income-Contingent Repayment caps payments at 20% of spare income over 25 years, and was the route parents with PLUS loans used. [21]

Betsy Mayotte, who runs the Institute for Student Loan Advisors, said borrowers chase the lowest monthly payment when the figure that matters is the total. [16]

Choosing a repayment plan is a decision most people make once, under time pressure, from a menu that keeps shrinking.

The cheapest month and the cheapest decade are rarely the same plan.

Roughly 43 million Americans owed a combined 1.6 trillion dollars in federal student debt before the new law, according to the Brookings Institution. [17]

About 35 million of them were supposed to be repaying. [17] Brookings expects the reforms to slow the growth of that debt while pushing more of the risk onto borrowers. [17]

It says the big economic shock already happened in 2023 to 2025, when payments restarted and spending and credit scores fell. [17]

The reforms are being argued about as if they were sudden.

Brookings' point is the opposite: the caps and new rules bite slowly, over years, on people not yet at university.

In the United States, a debt written off is usually treated as income you received, and taxed. [23]

A law passed in 2021 exempted most federal student loan forgiveness, but only for loans forgiven up to 31 December 2025. [22]

From 2026, a balance cancelled at the end of an income-driven plan is generally taxable again, arriving as a Form 1099-C the following January or February. [22]

Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars forgiven can mean a large tax bill at ordinary rates. [22]

Somebody who has paid for 20 or 25 years reaches the finish and meets a bill they did not borrow.

Forgiveness from death, disability or public service work is treated differently.

A class action first filed against the first Trump administration seven years ago has ended, clearing the debts of nearly half a million US borrowers who said their colleges lied to them. [25]

The rule at issue, borrower defense, lets students ask the Education Department to erase loans when a school misled them about job prospects, credits or salaries. [25]

The suit ran so long it carried three education secretaries' names, from Sweet v. DeVos in 2019 to Sweet v.

McMahon now. [25] Campaigners had argued the department deliberately stopped processing claims. [25]

The remedy existed the whole time; what failed was anyone processing it. Seven years is how long it took to force a decision that the rule already promised.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness cancels what is left of a US federal student debt for people who spend years working for a government or a non-profit employer. [26]

The Trump administration has changed the rules on who qualifies, barring some public workers from relief while resuming it for others. [26]

The change comes from the Trump administration rather than from a new law passed by the US Congress. [26]

The bargain in this programme is lower pay now in exchange for cancellation later. Redefining which employers count changes the price of a job somebody accepted years ago.

The UK government has capped the interest rate on Plan 2 student loans in England at 6%. [27]

Ministers cap the rate when they expect inflation to spike; earlier caps ran in 2021-22 and 2022-24, the highest at 8%. [27]

Baroness Smith said it protects those most exposed in an already unfair system. [27]

Amira Campbell of the National Union of Students called it a huge win and asked for the frozen repayment threshold to rise too. [27]

The cap limits how fast a balance grows, not how much anyone pays each month, which is set by earnings. Both sides of the argument agree it is a stopgap.

US borrowers can deduct student loan interest from their taxable income, up to 2,500 dollars or the interest actually paid, whichever is lower. [24]

It is an adjustment to income, so it works without itemising deductions. [24]

The deduction shrinks and then disappears above an income limit reset each year, and is unavailable to anyone filing separately from a spouse or claimed as someone else's dependent. [24]

It is one of the few reliefs a borrower claims for themselves rather than being enrolled in. The people it phases out are the ones whose payments are largest.

The Trump Organization sued Capital One over the closure of hundreds of its bank accounts in 2021, saying the bank was punishing it for the 6 January Capitol riot. [28]

Capital One has now asked a federal judge to dismiss the case permanently, arguing the closures followed a months-long internal anti-money-laundering review. [28]

The bank's filing puts a compliance process, not politics, at the centre of the decision. [28]

Almost nobody who loses a bank account gets to see this argument in public. The reason a bank gives a court is the reason ordinary customers are almost never told.

Banks and credit unions check a checking-account consumer report before opening an account, built from your account and transaction history at every bank you have used. [29]

It is not your credit report, and a good credit score can sit alongside a bad one of these. [29]

By law you can request a free copy every 12 months, and again if you were turned down, and the bank must name the company that supplied it. [29]

Reporting companies must investigate disputes, and most negative entries older than seven years cannot be included. [30]

Being refused an account blocks wages, rent and benefits at once. The rights to see the file and correct it exist, but only for people who know the file exists.

A joint bank account is owned equally by everyone named on it, and each holder can take all of it. [32]

In the United States each holder also gets their own deposit insurance, doubling the protected amount to 500,000 dollars. [32]

What happens when one holder dies depends on wording most people never read: with rights of survivorship the money passes to the survivor, while tenants in common sends that share to the dead person's heirs instead. [33]

The answer is in the account agreement. [33]

Couples open these to manage bills and inherit a rule about death at the same time. The wording decides who gets the money, and it outranks a will.

From April, statutory sick pay in the UK is paid from the first day of illness rather than the fourth, under the Employment Rights Act 2025. [34]

The Trades Union Congress calculates that about 8.4 million workers who rely on the statutory minimum gain from the change. [34]

A further 1.2 million who earned below the 125 pounds a week threshold qualify for the first time, most of them women and disabled workers. [34]

In the East Yorkshire town of Hedon, one resident called it overdue and another said it would encourage people to take days off. [35]

The three waiting days fell hardest on people paid by the hour with nothing saved. Graham Stuart, the local member of parliament, argues the same change discourages attendance.

Under the same UK law, employers must offer a zero-hours worker a guaranteed-hours contract based on the hours they actually worked over a 12-week period. [36]

Workers who prefer casual terms can stay on them; the change is that they can now ask and be given fixed hours. [36]

They also gain a right to reasonable notice of shift changes and compensation when a shift is cancelled or cut short. [36]

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says UK in-work protection is no longer fit for purpose, with sick pay and parental pay failing to keep pace with wages. [37]

An unpredictable rota is a household budgeting problem before it is an employment one.

Compensation for a cancelled shift puts a price on uncertainty that used to be free to the employer.