I'm 67 and getting worried about how risky my portfolio is. Are there better options than the S&P 500? (2025)

Maurie Backman

Mon, Apr 14, 2025, 7:30 AM 5 min read

When you’re younger and retirement is still decades away, you can often afford to take some risk in your portfolio. In fact, at that stage of life, it’s common to invest the bulk of your assets in the stock market.

But that doesn’t mean you have to go out and purchase stocks individually. You could make things easier on yourself by loading up on S&P 500 ETFs, which give you exposure to the 500 largest publicly-traded companies in the U.S.

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Since the S&P 500 is commonly used as a measure of the stock market’s performance as a whole, this is an easy way to diversify your portfolio without having to do a lot of work.

But while an S&P 500-focused strategy might make sense when you’re, say, 27, 37, or even 47 years old, it doesn’t necessarily make sense when you’re in your 60s.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re 67 and you want to balance out the risk factor in your portfolio. At this point in your life, you may already be retired or on the cusp of retirement, so it’s important to shift into safer investments that are less volatile.

Attaining the right risk profile

When you’re young and in the process of building retirement wealth, it can be disheartening to see your portfolio value take a hit. However, you can take comfort in the fact that you’re not going to be using that money for many years.

At 67, though, you can’t afford to take on the same amount of risk since you might be on the verge of tapping into your retirement savings for income, if you’re not already in the process of doing so. And since the stock market has a tendency to be volatile, it’s important to limit the extent to which you’re invested in it.

Pulling out of the stock market completely isn't ideal, either. Having a small portion of stocks in your portfolio can help you continue to grow your nest egg as you decumulate. But at age 67, you may want to limit the stock portion of your portfolio to about 50% or less, and the exact percentage should hinge on your risk tolerance. If you don’t have a large appetite for risk, you may want to limit stocks to 40%.

It’s not a bad idea to keep the stock portion of your retirement portfolio in S&P 500 ETFs. This gives you exposure to the broad market, and you could also load up on some dividend ETFs for more regular income.