FintechLex · Free Resource
The Decision Tables
The free companion workbook to What Nobody Tells You Before You Invest Abroad — thirty tables to screen your own project before you commit your money, your business and your family to another country.
Every chapter of the book ends with a decision table. Each one turns the chapter into a short list of criteria and the red flags that should make you stop and think. This workbook gathers all thirty tables in one document, so that you can work through them for your own project — on screen or on paper.
Download the workbook
Fillable PDF · 37 pages · 30 decision tables · Free
Fill it in on screen with any PDF reader, or print it. This page always holds the current edition.
How it works
Take one specific project — one country, one business, one structure — and work through the tables in order. For every criterion, mark one status:
CLEAR
The point has been checked and is acceptable for your project.
REVIEW
Obtain more evidence, model the downside or take current local advice.
STOP
Do not commit further capital until the issue is resolved. A trigger marked BLOCKING is an automatic STOP.
A single STOP is not a verdict on the whole project. It tells you where to look before you go any further.
The thirty tables
One table per chapter of the book:
- What Is Foreign Direct Investment?
- Not All Foreign Investors Are the Same
- Can You Actually Invest?
- You Are the Foreigner Now
- Before You Leave Home
- You Are Not Investing Alone
- Health Insurance, Driving and Personal Risk Abroad
- The Cost of Living: Cheap Country, Expensive Life
- The Midlife Crisis
- The Business Plan: Your First Assumption Will Be Wrong
- Buying an Existing Business: You Are Buying the Past as Well as the Future
- Does Your Business Model Travel?
- Running Out of Money Before You Open
- The False Safety of a Familiar Passport
- They Are Not Your Cheap Labour
- Corruption: When the Machine Needs Oil
- Can You Actually Live and Work There?
- Geopolitics: You Are Investing in a Country, Not a Spreadsheet
- Two Investments. Same Country. Completely Different Outcomes
- Security, Instability, and Micro-Geography: Protecting Yourself and Your Business
- Buying vs. Leasing Real Estate
- Local Partners: Marriage Without Divorce Laws
- The Banking Barrier: AML, KYC, Exchange Controls and Operational Friction
- How Do You Get Your Money Back?
- Tax: You Cannot Simply Disappear
- Your Accountant Can Destroy Your Company
- Contracts Are Only as Good as Your Ability to Enforce Them
- What Happens If Something Happens to You? (Key-Person Risk)
- Friendship, Distance and the Life You Leave Behind
- The Exit Strategy: How Do You Leave?
Please note
The thresholds in these tables are screening triggers, not universal legal or investment rules. Where a rule depends on local law, the local rule prevails. Legal thresholds — foreign-equity limits, land-ownership caps, lease-registration periods — must always be verified under the law that applies to the actual transaction. The tables are screening tools, not legal opinions.
The book behind the tables
What Nobody Tells You Before You Invest Abroad
A Practical Guide to Building a Business — and a Life — in Another Country
René Philippe Raymond Dubout · 30 chapters · 30 decision tables
Not a book about how international investment is supposed to work, but about what can happen when you actually do it. The tables are the checklist; the book explains, chapter by chapter, why each question matters.
To be published 1 October 2026
Questions about your own project: insight@fintechlex.com
