Our annual Overseas Retirement Index presents our selection of the world’s best places to retire overseas. These are beautiful, welcoming, and safe havens that offer compelling lifestyle opportunities.
How do we come up with this selection?
We cast a wide net to start, sourcing intel from a variety of sources to produce a long list of index-worthy havens.
Our first port of call for information is our core editorial team. We’re expats ourselves, so we have extensive international experience and know what’s important when it comes to making a move overseas.
Throughout the year, our editorial team is constantly scouting new locations for the index… assessing each place’s livability, speaking with locals and expats, analyzing property markets, experiencing local culture, and so on, to cultivate a well-rounded perspective.
Our next port of call is our global network of editors and contributors, including expats, experts, lawyers, real estate agents, and tax advisors, who are on the ground in the places we recommend and can give first-hand perspectives.
We’re tuned in to the zeitgeist and keep an eye on things like changing residency and tax policies… If some change in policy makes a place more or less favorable, we add or subtract it from our list.
We use a combination of all of this knowledge to cultivate an initial list of recommended havens. Then, over meetings, discussions, and debates, we whittle our long list down from dozens to a core few.
With our short list of havens in hand, we start crunching the numbers and put the destinations through the paces of our grading system. We make more additions and subtractions until we have our final list of recommended retirement havens for the year…
Throughout the destination-selection and ranking process, we aim to strike the perfect balance between objectivity and subjectivity…
We use as much data as possible to inform our assessments. This year’s index includes information from the World Health Organization’s World Health Report and the 2023 Global Peace Index, for example…
But creating a lifestyle index isn’t a perfect science, and there’s often a gap between what the raw data says about a place and what the lived experience of it is.
Our solution is to provide data but layer it with judgement… that of our core editorial team plus that of our network of contacts, contributors, insiders, expats, and experts…
Word-of-mouth recommendations, personal insights, and hard-won experience play a big role in the results.
We believe that these are the most valuable things we can offer you, dear reader, and so that’s what our index emphasizes.
Where’s the best place in the world to retire this year?
A couple can live well here on a monthly budget of $2,477.
It’s a remarkably safe spot and, if you choose to settle in long-term, there’s no restrictions on real estate purchases and a solid selection of residency options.
You’ll enjoy four seasons, can avail of top-notch, affordable health care ($30 for a consultation at a private clinic), and be able to get by easily in English for your day-to-day needs, too.
Sincerely,
Sophia Titley
Editor, Overseas Living Letter
