If All of Your Money’s Still in the US, You Need to Hear This

US markets are overvalued, the dollar is sinking, and the Fed’s out of tricks.

As Chief of Global Diversification at International Living, I have a ringside seat to the trends driving decision-making amongst potential expatriates… and one stood head and shoulders above all others in 2025.

Sure, people are still pursuing golden visas, retirement permits, and all the other ways to live abroad. But a rapidly growing number of people want to expatriate something else first… their money.

Let me be blunt: for now, at least, the economic good times are over… especially for Americans.

Even before the Trump Administration started tinkering with the rules and arrangements that made America an economic powerhouse, the US economy was running on fumes.

Those fumes consisted of the trillions of dollars of excess cash pumped out by the Fed since 2008, which encouraged global money flows into US equity markets. That’s led to ridiculously excessive valuations, which must fall… sooner rather than later.

The bottom line: many Americans are now wealthy only on paper… and it wouldn’t take much to send it all up in flames.

But smart people know this, and that’s why the bulk of the consultations I did in the second half of last year involved opportunities to invest abroad.

For years, Americans invested as if the rest of the world barely mattered. Today, that’s not just dangerous… it’s a terrible strategy. The S&P 500 finished 2025 with a total return of roughly 16% for the year. But the MSCI global stock market index excluding the United States doubled that return.

Let that sink in: If the bulk of your wealth was invested in the US stock market, you only earned 50% of what you could have last year.

The question now is what are you going to do about it? Today I want to highlight the factors that should shape that decision:

1. Spreading your investments around different sectors within the US is no longer enough: Today, geographical diversification is more important than merely dipping into varying sectors domestically. The US stock market is badly overvalued, and highly concentrated in just seven companies. Those companies’ valuations are based on the artificial intelligence boom, which everybody and his brother predicts is going to pop soon. Staying in the US market means you have a better than 50% chance of losing significant amounts of wealth in the next three to five years.
2. National policy frameworks matter more than ever: Despite notional admiration for the free market, the US government has been propping up artificially high returns for nearly 20 years. That can’t continue. Other countries, however, are making things their growing populations want, so their returns are sustainable. The first thing to think about when investing abroad is to find governments genuinely supporting that kind of growth.
3. Big nominal returns don’t matter if your assets are valued in a declining currency: My US stock portfolio earned 16% in 2025. But the US dollar declined 12% versus the South African rand, my spending currency. That means the return to my US investments in terms of my purchasing power was only 3%! Remember, purchasing power is the only thing that matters in the end.
4. US non-financial assets won’t save you: If current conditions persist, gains to US residential real estate will be flat after inflation for the next decade. Mortgage rates are unlikely to fall below 6%, so if you borrow to invest, you’ll lose money. By contrast, returns to real estate in select global markets are projected to reach 15 to 20% per annum.
5. Neither will the Fed: Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has consistently bailed out US investors and the government. But a declining dollar, massive federal budget deficits, and a rapidly declining labour force mean the Fed can’t do that anymore. If a 2008 style crisis happened today, you’d be on your own, or at least even more than you were back then.
6. The US is still over-leveraged: The global financial sector blew up in 2008 because US banks, businesses, and households were using debt to maintain profits and living standards. Banks and households are better off now thanks to post-2008 legislation. But corporate borrowing has exploded, especially from non-bank sources like private credit. Liquidity mismatch is as bad as it was in 2008. Treasury market stress or forced selling could easily explode the financial sector again… and this time the Fed will be powerless.

Put it all together, and the implication is clear: 2026 is the year to move your money to safer shores.

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