I will never understand why large organizations hoard money

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With the Church's wealth in the news lately it got me thinking about this topic. So many people and organizations just hoard money. Why? What good does money do you if you aren't going to use it?

I once worked for a major non-profit organization many years ago and they had over 100 million in assets that they would not touch. It was kind of something they liked to keep hush hush and not discuss openly (kinda like the Church until recently). Why? Why hoard money like this? Is it because it's not necessarily liquid cash? Because the money is actually in assets, investments and portfolios? I gueaa I could sort of understand if that's the case.

[mahalanobis]

I don't presume to know the answer.

My current employer (organization, not an individual) does the same thing.

A large corpus of untouched assets dramatically reduces the odds of a company going under, which should translate to stock value. This obviously does not answer the question for the case of organizations that are not publicly traded.

[Silver Pie]

Fear?

[harakim]

With the Church's wealth in the news lately it got me thinking about this topic. So many people and organizations just hoard money. Why? What good does money do you if you aren't going to use it?

I once worked for a major non-profit organization many years ago and they had over 100 million in assets that they would not touch. It was kind of something they liked to keep hush hush and not discuss openly (kinda like the Church until recently). Why? Why hoard money like this? Is it because it's not necessarily liquid cash? Because the money is actually in assets, investments and portfolios? I gueaa I could sort of understand if that's the case.

It's rare they actually hoard money. The usually invest it. However, when they are hoarding money, it's because either 1) they think it's the end of the financial world, 2) they aren't smart enough to know what to do with it.
In the case of the church, I doubt they have that much cash. It's probably almost all in investments.

[JK4Woods]

Sometimes its to ward off a hostile takeover...
Plenty of cash on hand is a good as a war chest in the event a competitor comes calling to buy them out, and the current board has no desire to be removed from power...

[MMbelieve]

Money is power in this world. It’s really not hard to understand why a company or individual hoards money. Maybe it’s just difficult to deal with the fact that they have money and we don’t or that they are not using it like we would if we had it.

Perspective is the difference here. If you ran a large company and had millions, it’s likely equivalent to thousands to regular folks. I like to keep a certain amount of “thousands” in my account as free money (not tagged for a use) for security and peace of mind. If I was a CEO you bet I would want a certain amount of “millions” in the account as free money. It’s amazing the stress relieved when you have extra sitting around.

Same principle of food storage in the church. Hungry people around the world would say what’s the point of all those cans of food and buckets of wheat if your not using it...I could feed my children with it!