Social Security Retirees Are More Concentrated in US Assets Than They Realize. What to Do About It.

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.

Why Social Security Is a Pure Bet on America

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.

For Margaret, that guaranteed floor is the single most important number in her retirement plan. It is why she can sleep through headlines about capital flight. Across the country, Social Security paid out $1,630.3 billion at an annualized rate in Q1 2026, and reaches roughly 70 million beneficiaries. You cannot diversify away that income stream, and she would not want to. A US-government-backed, inflation-adjusted paycheck is the safest piece of her balance sheet.

The Rest of Her Balance Sheet Tells the Same Story

Once Margaret adds up the pieces, the concentration is striking:

1. Her Social Security benefit: 100% US.
2. Her IRA, sitting in a US total-market index fund: 100% US equities.
3. Her home, her single largest asset by market value: 100% US real estate, in one zip code.

This is what economists call home-country bias, and it is the norm for American households. It is also the piece Margaret can actually adjust, unlike her Social Security check. The wealthy families in the Citi story are rebalancing where their investment dollars are booked. The retail version of that same instinct is a boring question: does the investable part of my portfolio need a slice of non-US stocks through a broad, low-cost globally diversified fund?

How This Reframes the Wealthy-Flight Headline

The Citi analysis is a real signal about how sophisticated investors are thinking about currency and country risk. But it skips what matters most to Margaret: her biggest asset, the lifetime income stream from Social Security, is already an unhedgeable long position on the United States. That is a feature, not a bug.

The 10-year Treasury yield near 4.5%, elevated by historical standards but far from crisis territory, and the University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading near 45, a level that ranks among the lowest ever recorded, on par with the depths of the 2022 inflation scare, tell you the mood is anxious. Neither changes the mechanics of her monthly deposit.

What Margaret Should Actually Do

Two practical takeaways, warmly meant. First, treat the Social Security check as the anchor it is, and resist the urge to reshuffle retirement plans based on what billionaires are doing with their booking centers. Their tools belong to a different world, and her guaranteed floor is something they would surely welcome. Second, if she wants to act on the underlying insight, the place to look is the investment portfolio. Adding modest, broadly diversified international exposure through a low-cost fund is the ordinary saver’s version of the same idea, and it is reversible if she changes her mind.

Every retirement looks a little different once you list the pieces on paper. Margaret’s exercise is worth doing at any age, if only to see clearly what you already own, and to notice that the part everyone worries about is often the part working exactly as intended.

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