Understanding Funeral Home Procedures

If you are planning your funeral and body disposal plans so that your family knows what to do, cremation is certainly an option. But If you're going to be cremated and have gold fillings, crowns, or other dental work, you may want to make some special arrangements ahead of time. Gold dental material isn't really used that much anymore, so you may want your family to have yours for whatever reason. But if you don't take action now, your family could be left with a burnt and bureaucratic mess.

Gold or Gold Alloy?

You may want to double-check that your gold crowns and fillings are actually made of gold. Many times these crowns and fillings are made of an alloy that contains gold but that also has so much other metal in it that the amount of actual gold is very small. Extracting the gold would require extra steps that might cost your family more than the worth of the gold in the crown or filling. It can be frustrating to find that there's no real gold value in a crown or filling after going to the trouble of getting the tooth pulled out or rescued from crematory ashes, so contact your dentist to find out what metal was really used.

Check the Cremation Contract

Sometimes crematoriums refuse to turn over gold teeth and other valuables that were sent through crematorium flames. At this point, any metal would have become a melted lump anyway, so you wouldn't be able to get the items in their original form. Still, if you want those items, check the contract that the crematorium uses. Sometimes these say that items like gold teeth will not be returned. In this case, you'll either need to find another crematorium to work with, or you'll have to make arrangements to have the gold teeth removed before you're cremated.

Maybe Get Those Crowns Changed Now

One such way is to get your gold teeth changed now. While it might be nice to have a gold crown or filling, given the rarity of gold as a dental replacement material nowadays, it would be a lot easier to just have the crown or filling replaced with composite material, with you walking away with the gold.

Talk to the cremation director about what happens to valuable items like gold teeth once your body is in the hands of the crematorium staff. Don't ignore the items and let your family deal with the red tape after you die.