In case you are looking to spend your retirement days somewhere in the Middle East, we recommend checking out our list of best places to retire in Israel. The country has the highest standard of living in the region and is placed third in the whole of Asia. The downside is high costs of living in the country and high possibility of terrorist attacks.
High standard of living is contributed by one of the best and most technologically advanced healthcare systems in the world. According to Bloomberg, Israel’s healthcare system is ranked on the 7th place by efficiency in the world. This rank still represents a downfall since 2009 when the country was ranked 4th. According to Israeli Medical Association, the country had 3.43 physicians per 1,000 people or 25,850 in total. The number of hospital beds is low and stands at 1.87 beds per 1,000. The great thing is that healthcare is free for all citizens and residents. There are 4 non-profit organizations that deal with health insurance and you can choose the one that fits your needs the best. There is also an option to choose private health insurance.
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The United States Overseas Security Advisory Council Crime and Safety report from 2017 tells us you should be careful about residential burglaries, vehicle thefts and petty thefts which are common for all places in Israel. However, violent and street crimes are uncommon. The thing that should worry you the most is Israel being labeled as the high-threat location for terrorism activity. This is due to ongoing Israel – Palestine conflict and overall instability in the region including the war in Syria. Israel’s major cities like Be’er Sheva and Jerusalem suffered from terrorist related attacks with casualties in 2016. If this is too much for you, maybe you should turn to Europe and check out our list of 10 Best Places to Retire in Spain.
Now, you must be wondering how we created our list of best places to retire in Israel. First, we took recommendations from various sources like Expat Focus and The Wall Street Journal among others. The majority of the recommendations focused on four or five bigger cities in the country, while for some recommended places like Ra’anana we couldn’t get enough information. This is why we supplemented the recommendations with other Israel’s high profile cities. The cities were ranked and given points according to the cost of living index taken from Numbeo and hospital to population ratio (Google Maps) while taking into consideration the temperature averages through the year (World Weather Online). We summed it all up into our IM Score and got the list. We usually take into consideration the rainy and sunny days averages as well, but this time we only listed them since there was no big difference between the destinations. For a better understanding of the displayed information about each place, we should note that cost of living index is comparable to 100.00, which is the index of New York. The hospital to population ratio determines, in theory, how many people from the entire city’s population are assigned to one private/public hospital. Finally, the weather information represents the highest and lowest average in the year. Let’s take a look at our list of best places to retire in Israel.
