The Corporate Version of Caring for Your Parents

As you get older and your parents get frail, there comes a point when you have to decide how to care for them. If it’s a decision to put them in a care home, the costs have to be found. Often that will be through selling their home. And remember, it’s often your childhood home too. Sad that their care requires the sale of something with such precious memories.

When Defined Benefit plans were ‘invented’, they were affordable. A combination of longevity, market changes and strict accounting practices means that this is no longer the case. So what to do? The promises have been made. You need to care for those where a pension has been promised. So sometimes, you have to sell what is precious to you.

That’s what has happened this week with the Royal Geographical Society. In order to fund the pension promises, they are selling some of their precious artwork. Paintings that have been in their collection for over a century.

Sad that promises made require the sale of something so precious and irreplaceable. Witness the corporate equivalent of selling the parental home. But the ongoing care of the elderly has to be more important than even the most beautiful of paintings. Or houses for that matter. Or businesses too?.....