Investing in Israel and Beyond

Investing as an Oleh is where the gap between the standard Israeli playbook and the standard advice from your home country becomes impossible to ignore.

An Israeli with no foreign ties can max out a few tax-advantaged buckets, pick a couple of low-cost index funds through their bank or broker, and call it a day. An Oleh with foreign citizenship, foreign brokerage accounts, foreign retirement balances, and a brand-new Israeli tax status has a much more interesting set of choices, several of which interact in ways that no single advisor on either side of the ocean is incentivized to understand fully. The goal of this section is to walk through those choices in plain English, with the actual tax math built in rather than waved away.

The first question is where to hold your investments. As a new Israeli resident you can open an account with an Israeli broker, you can keep your old US, UK, or other home-country brokerage account (with rules that vary widely depending on the broker and your nationality), and you can use a global broker like Interactive Brokers that supports Israeli residents. Each of these choices has a different cost structure, a different tax-reporting picture, and a different set of available products. Some popular US-domiciled funds and ETFs cannot be purchased in Europe or by EU-resident investors, but Israeli residents are typically not subject to those PRIIPs restrictions, which gives Olim an unusually wide menu compared to neighbors in other countries.

The Israeli system has two genuinely valuable savings vehicles that most newcomers underestimate. Keren hishtalmut (study fund) is, despite the name, one of the most powerful general-purpose savings buckets in the developed world. Employer and employee contributions are tax-favored, the assets compound tax-free during the holding period, and after six years the entire balance can be withdrawn without tax consequences for any purpose. Self-employed Olim can open a self-employed keren hishtalmut as well. The catch, particularly for American Olim, is that the underlying funds are typically Israeli mutual funds that are classified as PFICs under US law, which can completely undo the Israeli tax benefit. The right structure depends on your nationality and your timeline.

Kupot gemel and the broader Israeli pension system work fundamentally differently from a US 401(k) or a UK personal pension, and getting the structure right early in your Israeli career compounds enormously. Employer pension contributions are mandatory in Israel and get split across a few buckets (severance, retirement, disability), and the choices you make about provider, fund, and risk level are mostly defaults that very few employees ever revisit. We walk through what to actually look at and when to switch providers.

For American Olim specifically, the PFIC question shapes everything. Almost every Israeli mutual fund, almost every Israeli ETF, and most of the default investment options inside Israeli pension and study funds are classified as Passive Foreign Investment Companies for US tax purposes, which means punitive US tax treatment that often exceeds the gross return on the investment. There are workarounds (US-domiciled ETFs held through Israeli or global brokers, certain pension structures that escape PFIC treatment, careful timing of contributions and withdrawals), but they require deliberate choices that most generic Israeli investment advice will not even mention.

Currency hedging is the question every Oleh wrestles with eventually. If your salary is in shekels but you plan to retire in dollars or pounds, or vice versa, the currency mismatch between your savings and your future spending is a real risk, and the answer is rarely the simple one. The 10-year exemption on foreign-source capital gains gives Olim a unique window to reshape their portfolio in ways that would be expensive later, and that window is genuinely time-limited.

A few practical notes on how to use this section. If you are just getting started and want a simple structure for your first Israeli investments, start with the Building Wealth path. If you are American and need to understand the PFIC trap before you make any investment, the US-Investor Path is the most important one to read first. And if you are approaching retirement or thinking about how to structure income across countries, the Cross-Border Retirement path is built specifically for that question.