While wealthy families move assets abroad, typical retirees hold 100% US-concentrated portfolios through Social Security, domestic index funds, and a single-zip-code home.
Social Security pays $1.6 trillion annually to roughly 70 million Americans, making it an unhedgeable US position, but its inflation-adjusted guarantee makes it a retirement strength.
Retirees wanting to act on diversification concerns should focus on their investment portfolio, adding modest international exposure through a low-cost, broadly diversified fund.
Are you ahead, or behind on retirement? SmartAsset's free tool can match you with a financial advisor in minutes to help you answer that today. Each advisor has been carefully vetted, and must act in your best interests. Don't waste another minute; learn more here.
Margaret is 67, retired last year from a hospital administration job in Ohio, and reads the financial news over coffee. This week a headline caught her eye: a top Citi Wealth executive told Fortune that "for the first time" in her career, U.S. clients are asking to book their assets outside the country. Margaret does not have a family office. She does have Social Security, a rollover IRA that mostly holds a US total-market index fund, and a paid-off house in a Cleveland suburb. She sat down to check her own "diversification" and had an uncomfortable realization: she is about as concentrated in one country as a person can be.
That exposure is simply the structure of an ordinary American retirement. And once you see it clearly, the ultrawealthy story reads very differently.
_________________________________
Here's a question most people 5y from retirement can't answer: at your current savings rate, how much do you need, and how long will it actually last? A good advisor can put a date on that in a single meeting. SmartAsset's free quiz matches you with up to three fiduciary advisors serving your area, so you can get YOUR retirement number now (sponsor)
__________________________________________
Margaret's monthly Social Security check is paid in US dollars, funded by US payroll taxes, backed by the US Treasury, and adjusted each year by a US inflation index. There is no international share class. The 2026 cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) is 2.8%, calculated from the year-over-year change in the Q3 average of a specific inflation measure called CPI-W, the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, currently at 328.8. That mechanical link to American prices is the whole reason the check keeps pace with the cost of groceries in Cleveland, not Lisbon.
Source: Yahoo Finance Top News — This article was automatically imported from the source. Read full article at original source →
