GOODWILL

Many of the former owners and staff of our acquired funeral homes and certain cemeteries have provided high quality service to families for generations. The resulting loyalty often represents a substantial portion of the value of a business. The excess of the purchase price over the fair value of identifiable net assets of funeral home businesses acquired is recorded as goodwill. Goodwill has primarily been recorded in connection with the acquisition of funeral home businesses.

Our goodwill has an indefinite life and is not subject to amortization. As such, we test goodwill for impairment on an annual basis. Under current guidance, we are permitted to first assess qualitative factors to determine whether it is more-likely-than not that the fair value of a reporting unit is less than its carrying amount as a basis for determining whether it is necessary to perform a quantitative goodwill impairment test. Our intent is to perform the quantitative impairment test at least once every three years unless certain indicators or events suggest otherwise and perform the qualitative assessment during the remaining two years. For our 2018 annual impairment test, we performed a qualitative assessment. We determined that there were no factors that would indicate the need to perform a quantitative goodwill impairment test and concluded that it is more-likely-than not that the fair value of our reporting units is greater than their carrying value and thus there was no impairment to goodwill.

See Note 1 to the Consolidated Financial Statements included herein, for a discussion of the methodology used for our annual goodwill impairment test.

The following table presents changes in goodwill in the accompanying Consolidated Balance Sheet for the years ended December 31, 2017 and 2018 (in thousands):



	December 31, 2017		December 31, 2018
Goodwill at the beginning of year	$	275,487	$	287,956
Increase in goodwill related to acquisitions	12,469		16,777
Decrease in goodwill related to impairments	—		(846		)
Goodwill at the end of the year	$	287,956	$	303,887