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Think about whether your retirement has to be planned out, or if you can afford uncertainty. The latter allows you to plan to either get by in a small place and live with pretty much just the bare necessities, or, if lucky, end up not having to work anymore at 40 with a nice house payed in cash. Just decouple enough from localized risk. E.g., if you were in a smaller country with it's own currency, maybe try to avoid anything formally denominated in that currency, as it's not hedged against inflation and small countries tend to go to printing cash if they're broke. Only optimize for a good trade-off between risk-exposure and re-shuffling costs (in this case, brokerage commissions). The wider the spread, the less any localized event hits you. If you're spread on the world, GDP-weighted, you loose less than 30% if the complete north american region would collapse. International connections/dependencies between suppliers in industry affect this negatively, however.

Be careful about US and GB being rather overweight due to historic accumulation of financial institutions, which only really have an imaginary value not tied to any tangible assets. Thus market-cap weighting gives them a far bigger share of your assets than benefits you in hedging localized economic risk.




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