Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the help of my husband, Lief Simon. He's my number cruncher, tax advisor, currency converter, and spreadsheet guru. He's also been my partner in every overseas real estate investment I've made throughout my career.
With one exception—the accidental developer experience I found myself involved with a few years before I met Lief, on the south Pacific coast of Nicaragua. For that, I have Bill Bonner and Mark Ford to thank, and I do.
In these pages I share stories of the overseas real estate adventures of friends with personal experience living, buying, and selling in the countries I feature, especially Paul Terhorst, who gives brilliant insights into why Argentina is the lovable basket case it is, and Lee Harrison, Lucy Culpepper, Ann Kuffner, Wendy Justice, and Coley Hudgins.
Thank you, also, to Denis Foynes and David Saxton, for all their quick research and reliable fact checking. The fruits of their labor are featured in Appendix A.
Thank you to Richard Narramore, both for proposing and developing this project and for helping me to clarify and broaden my understanding of things I'd thought I'd understood for years. Thank you to Lydia Dimitriadis for so skillfully shepherding the project at John Wiley & Sons.
Finally, thank you to all the attorneys whose counsel I've come to rely on around the world, especially Morette Kinsella in Ireland, Stephane Adler and Jean Taquet in France, Rainelda Mata-Kelly in Panama, Juan Federico ...
