A funeral home facing financial oblivion has appealed to the loved ones of the dead to come and pick up their ashes.
J Weir & Co of Onehunga in Auckland is in liquidation after too many people failed to pay for funerals, leaving the owners, Richard and May Melville, unable to pay all the company's debts.
"We currently have 200 unclaimed urns," the liquidators of the 118-year-old funeral business said in a public notice in the Herald. "Ashes that remain unclaimed after June 30, 2015, will be appropriately scattered in a peaceful place accompanied by a small ceremony."
Mr Melville said he was confident most of the urns would be retrieved. Any ashes left would be returned to the crematorium where the person was cremated "and scattered there".
He said the home's problems arose from some of its clients having been "in a bit of a financial strife", leaving unpaid debts for funerals that could cost anything from $4000-$5000 up to $14,000.
Funeral Directors Association chief executive Katrina Shanks said it was rare for funeral homes to go into liquidation, but they were vulnerable to the same cashflow issues as any business and some gave longer credit than most companies.
"Many people struggle to be able to afford a funeral because it's one of those abnormal expenses someone faces. You find sometimes people don't have the ability to pay a bill quickly."
She urged families to discuss prearranging funerals so they could plan for the costs.
About 70 per cent of the dead were cremated these days, she said. Funeral costs varied greatly around the country and depending on how the body was disposed of, burial was generally much more expensive.
"Most Pacific Islanders are buried so that's a big cost for the Pacific Island community," Ms Shanks said.
Excluding digging, burial plots last year cost around $4000 in Auckland but just $565 in Taupo, the cheapest city to be put in the ground. She said the fees charged by crematoriums were $564 on the North Shore and in Manukau, and $472 in Taupo and Napier.
It was common for funeral homes to be left holding unclaimed ashes.
"I was in a home the other day that had ashes from 1940. They have got the name [of the person entitled to them] they just don't have a current contact."