Moving your money, your business and your family to another country is not just an investment decision. It is a life decision.

This is not a legal guide. It is not a tax manual. It is a book about what actually happens when an entrepreneur takes his savings, his business and sometimes his whole life abroad — and about the questions that can destroy an investment long before anyone reads the law.

Can you actually invest in that sector? Can you legally work in your own company? How much money will you really need? What happens if your local partner turns against you, if your accountant follows a bad instruction, if your bank asks you to prove where money you earned twenty years ago came from? And what happens if the investment works, but your life doesn’t?

Drawing on more than thirty years of helping foreign investors establish, operate and exit businesses in Southeast Asia and Europe — including the mistakes he made himself — lawyer Rene Philippe Raymond Dubout walks through the decisions in the order they really arise, from choosing the country to planning the exit. Every chapter ends with a decision table you can use before committing money, moving your family or signing with a partner. All the decision tables are also available as a fillable companion workbook.

The country changes. The questions remain.

The villa is beautiful. The sunset is real. The agent is charming. And nobody has told you who actually owns the land.

Every year, thousands of people buy a home, a retirement apartment or an investment property in a country that is not their own. They check the view, the price and the pool. Far fewer check the title, the developer’s finances, the payment schedule, the owners’ association — or how they will ever get their money out. This book is about the questions they should have asked.

Drawing on more than thirty years of advising foreign buyers in Thailand — and on his own experience of buying off plan in a project that stopped — lawyer Rene Philippe Raymond Dubout shows what really goes wrong: titles that are not what they seem, roads that are too narrow for the building they serve, nominee structures that collapse under investigation, leases sold as ownership, developers building with your money, currency bets nobody explained. Every chapter ends with a field checklist you can take to your lawyer.

This is not a legal guide to any one country. It is a guide to the questions that apply in every country. Laws change. The questions remain.

Every year, investors, family offices and fintech founders buy or build a bank, in the Caribbean, Monaco or Switzerland. They celebrate the regulator’s approval—then discover that no one will clear their payments.

A licence is not a bank. It is permission to start building one. Without a correspondent bank, working payment rails and enough cash to survive until break-even, it is an expensive certificate. Drawing on thirty years of building, selling, buying and evaluating banks, Rene Philippe Raymond Dubout explains the real prices, real timelines and the moments when a buyer should walk away.

Inside the book

• Why a regulator can license you but cannot force a single bank to bank you
• Capital versus runway—the mistake that ruins new bank owners
• What it really costs, from a few million dollars offshore to CHF 30 million and more in Switzerland
• Thirteen jurisdictions compared, from Cayman and Dominica to Monaco, Liechtenstein and Switzerland
• How banks fail, and what each failure teaches a buyer
• The 20 questions to answer before you sign

Read it before you wire the funds.

Since 1 October 2026, the Swiss self-regulatory organisation (SRO) is no longer only for payment companies, currency exchanges and crypto businesses. The revised Anti-Money Laundering Act also covers certain advisers: lawyers, fiduciaries, company formation and domiciliation providers and real estate professionals who take part in certain transactions. Those already active must apply to an SRO before 1 December 2026.

The first four parts explain the system: what an SRO really is, who must join, what the application file must contain, piece by piece, and what happens after admission: the annual audit, the bank account problem, the crypto rules, the coming reform, and how to buy an existing SRO company without buying its problems.

The fifth part takes thirteen business models one by one: crypto exchange, custody, stablecoins, gold, art and freeports, tokenisation, international payments, merchant services, escrow, lending, crowdfunding, trade finance, and the businesses that sit next to finance. For each one, it asks the questions that matter. Where does the money go? Who is the client’s counterparty? Is an SRO enough, or do you need a FINMA licence? What will the reform change?

Every chapter ends with six things to remember and a decision table. At the end: the whole SRO file on one page, as a checklist.

Inside the book

• SRO or FINMA licence: where the line really runs
• New since 1 October 2026: advisers too, and the 1 December 2026 deadline
• Can you be admitted? The checks on directors and shareholders
• The application file, piece by piece, with realistic budgets and timelines
• The annual audit, the bank account problem and crypto
• Buying an SRO company: what to check before you pay
• Thirteen business models, from crypto and gold to payments, escrow and lending
• The coming FINMA licences for crypto institutions and payment instrument institutions

Getting into crypto takes five minutes and a payment card. Getting out, with your money, is where the trouble starts.

Every cycle, a new wave of ordinary investors buys Bitcoin because the price is rising and sells because it is falling. The chart recovers. They do not. The Bank for International Settlements found that most retail buyers lost money in the very years the price multiplied. That is not bad luck. It is the gap between the asset and the investor, and nobody explains it before you buy.

This book does. Written for Mr. Everybody rather than the trader or the technologist, it follows the money from the first purchase to the day you try to put the gains back in a bank: the crashes of 77 to 94 per cent, the exchanges that lost their customers’ coins, the lenders who bet your deposits on a rising market, the scams built around a friendly voice, the yield that somebody else is paying, the tax bill on a token you never sold, and the question almost nobody asks: who gets your crypto when you die?

The author has spent more than twelve years building the things this book warns you about. He has never bought a Bitcoin. There is nothing here to sell you and no loss to avenge: just what happens, in plain words, with a decision table at the end of every chapter.

Inside the book

• Why the return of an asset is not the return of the people who buy it
• Mt. Gox, Terra, Celsius, FTX: what failed, and what you could have seen
• How your bank reacts when crypto profits arrive in your account
• Getting your money back is not getting your performance back
• Pig butchering, rug pulls, deepfakes, and the second scam that follows the first
• Where yield really comes from, and what “stable” does not mean
• Exchange, custodian or your own keys, and what happens to them when you are gone

Book 4 of the What Nobody Tells You series, after What Nobody Tells You Before You Invest Abroad, Before You Buy Property Abroad and Before You Buy a Bank.

Most crypto books tell you what can be stolen from you. This one is about what can stop you using money nobody has stolen.

Your coins can sit safely on the blockchain, your keys can be perfectly secure, and you can still be unable to sell, move or spend a single euro of them. A blockchain halts for hours. An exchange freezes your account. The bank behind your stablecoin closes on a Friday. A bridge goes down. A wallet app disappears from the store. None of that is theft, and all of it costs you the same thing: access.

This is the plumbing: the miners, validators, issuers, banks, bridges and oracles that sit between you and your money. It is invisible when it works, and it is the whole story when it doesn’t.

Twenty chapters follow the same 20,000 euros from one failure to the next: what breaks, who decides when it gets fixed, how long that takes, and what you can actually do about it. Real incidents, dated and sourced. Stress scenarios that show where the limits are. And the longer-term risks, including the one I did not expect to be writing about: what happens if an artificial intelligence goes after the networks themselves.

Inside the book

• Who pays to keep Bitcoin secure once the subsidy shrinks, and why that question belongs to long-term holders
• What happens when a blockchain simply stops, and who decides when it starts again
• What happens when everybody wants to move their crypto on the same day
• Where the money behind a stablecoin actually sits, and what happened when one of its banks failed
• Redeeming is not selling: the door most holders have never tested
• Your crypto is fine — but can you still get back to a bank account?
• Who really controls a decentralised blockchain, and what it runs on
• Can someone freeze your crypto, and who exactly can do it
• Bridges, oracles and wallet apps: the parts nobody mentions until they break
• When someone else’s crypto becomes your problem
• Correlated failures, quantum computers, and the day a machine goes after the network itself

I have never owned a Bitcoin. I have spent years working on the pipes crypto runs through, and I once refused to be paid in one. It reached me anyway, through somebody else, and then it froze. That story is in Chapter 16.

A companion to What Nobody Tells You Before You Invest in Crypto.