I'm documenting my return to Cameroon,one calculator at a time.

I'm a 29-year-old Cameroonian living in the UAE. Like many diaspora, I moved abroad for work, telling myself I'd go back "someday." Someday became 3 years, then 5, and I realized I had no actual plan. Just a vague intention.

I started researching what it would take to return — costs, timelines, savings targets, housing, healthcare, the works. What I found was either too generic ("save money and go home!") or too salesy ("invest in this property!"). Nobody was doing the actual math, publicly, with honest numbers.

So I started building calculators. First for myself — to figure out my savings rate, audit my remittances, project my return date. Then I realized: if I needed these tools, other diaspora probably do too.

That's how Leverage Abroad was born. It's not a business plan — it's my actual return planning, documented in real-time, with the tools I build along the way.

Most "return to Africa" content falls into three buckets:

• "Africa is amazing, come home!" — Emotionally appealing, practically useless. No math, no plan, no timeline.
• "Buy this investment property!" — Salesy, often sketchy. Somebody's making money off your nostalgia.
• "I moved back, here's my story." — Inspiring, but after-the-fact. You can't replicate their journey because they're describing the outcome, not the planning.

What's missing is calculator-backed, honest, in-progress planning — someone figuring it out in real-time, sharing the tools they build, and being honest about costs, trade-offs, and complications.

That's what I do here. Every calculator exists because I needed it. Every video walks through one of these tools with real (hypothetical) numbers. Every newsletter shares what I've learned that week.

I don't share my real salary, savings, or expenses. Instead, I use three hypothetical diaspora personas to cover the range of situations my audience might be in:

Each video and article runs the calculators with all three personas, so you can find the one that matches your situation. This is more useful than sharing my real numbers — it serves the whole audience.