The funding problem has one shape: a large sum has to arrive, in full, at the moment of your death, when you are not there to authorise the transfer.
Every method below is a different answer to that. They differ mainly in how many things have to go right, and who has to act.
The most common answer is also the cheapest and the least interesting, which is what you want from an instrument that has to work without you.
Term life insurance
Term life pays a fixed death benefit if you die within a fixed period, usually 10, 20 or 30 years, for a level premium.
Name Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH as beneficiary and the payout goes straight to your preservation. No relative has to find the money, authorise a transfer, or agree with your decision.
Two routes are available. Through our insurance partner VKB we send you the application, submit it, manage the underwriting, and VKB pays us directly. Or you use any term-life provider in your own country and name us as beneficiary yourself.
The mechanics and the age pricing are covered in term and whole life insurance.
The one thing to plan around is the expiry date. A policy that lapses while you are still alive leaves the preservation unfunded, and replacing it later means requalifying at an older age.
Whole life insurance
Whole life covers you for life rather than for a term, at a fixed premium, and part of each payment builds a cash value that grows tax-deferred.
It costs several times a term policy for the same benefit. The cash value grows modestly and is reduced by fees and surrender charges, and borrowing against it incurs interest and lowers the death benefit.
It works best alongside term cover rather than instead of it: term carries the early decades cheaply, whole life covers the years after the term ends.
Trusts
A discretionary trust does two jobs in sequence. It pays for the preservation and storage, then invests what remains so that a revived person would have resources.
Most clients fund the trust with a life insurance policy owned by the trust, which keeps the money immediately available at legal death rather than waiting on an estate.
For UK residents it is the most flexible route. Trustees can adapt as requirements change over long periods, a properly structured trust has inheritance-tax advantages, and the funds are ring-fenced for preservation.
It requires multiple potential beneficiaries to meet UK legal standards, a professional trust deed, and ongoing compliance with UK trust taxation and reporting. This is wealth-management territory, and it pairs with wealth management for cryopreservation.
Whether value can actually be carried across legal death to a revived person is a separate and unsettled question, covered in can wealth be preserved for use after reanimation.
Pre-payment
You can pay Tomorrow.bio directly, without insurance or a trust.
We accept this in two situations: a confirmed medical prognosis with a life expectancy under 12 months, or a patient in critical condition or recently deceased where arrangements are needed immediately.
It exists for cases where the slower instruments cannot be set up in time. The full route from decision to signed contract is in setting up a funding method.
The one route we cannot accept
A last will cannot fund a cryopreservation, and the reason is timing rather than principle.
Tomorrow.bio transfers 120,000 euros to long-term patient care immediately on preservation. A will is settled through probate, which takes months and can be contested.
So the money would be committed long before the will could release it. That mismatch is a financial risk we cannot carry, and it is the same structural failure that makes family-funded preservation at death risky.
Arrangements that fall outside these categories but can provide liquidity before the procedure are assessed case by case, and start with a consultation call.
If you are starting from nothing and want the cheapest reliable route, it is term life insurance taken out young. Everything else is refinement on top of that.
TL;DR: Life insurance is the most common way to fund cryopreservation. Prepayment, trusts and other assets may work, but a will is usually too slow because probate happens after payment is needed.
Further reading