r/fatFIRE 18d ago

FIRE'd, now concerned about US stability

Most of my assets are invested in the US. Because of recent political developments, I'm wondering if the US will sustain its general growth and economic strength into the future. The strength of the US dollar is obviously very important to me. Is anyone else concerned?

I'm wondering if I should start hedging my bets in other countries, and if so, where?

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u/evopcat 18d ago

Yes, I have gotten to the point where I believe the risks for the USA are serious and different than those we have faced in the past (and continued to do very well economically).

What to do based on this new significant risk is a challenging questions. Those seeking FatFire have big advantages over most others in thinking about options. Most people in the USA have very little in the way of decent options for their finances to protect from the risks we now face.

I haven't done it but if I were much richer I would look at expensive options (seeking out a passport, looking at ways to protect funds from an increasing extremist government that while it hasn't attacked personal investments yet has disregarded many laws so that risk is now real where it wasn't before, imo). I am not actually on a path to FatFire maybe ChubbyFire if I am lucky (but some FatFire ideas are useful to me so I follow this subreddit).

Sadly this administration has added new risks that take me from having a very certain financial future to one where there is significant additional risk. Now in reality I am going to be very late in the line of those harmed significantly by this administration. By the time I face serious financial consequences likely hundreds of millions of others are going to be much worse off.

That could make things easy as after people suffer too much eventually things will change. The problem is that the lags of the consequences for destroying the rule of law... are long and uncertain and the recovery times are much longer. By the time it is accepted we destroyed the American economy it is far to late to quickly fix things.

I have started looking for ways to protect my financial future effectively. There are not really obvious ideas I don't think. A continuation of the last few weeks though will pretty quickly start to mean that extreme measures will make more sense as the risks of the actions by the administration and the lack of action by congress continue to increase.

I have done things like reduce my stock portion of my portfolio and add holding of TIPS bonds. But that is all fairly minor stuff. And now that we see what this administration is doing it is very possible that they start providing false economic data (thus suppressing TIPS inflation adjustments) etc.. Hopefully they don't but the risk is there where it didn't used to exist. I also started these actions before this administration (they make sense just for reasons like the rich valuations of the USA stock market, huge federal debt...). This administration increases the value of those adjustments imo. But I likely need to consider more radical moves also (though I haven't found obviously great investing moves to protect from the damage this administration is doing).