Housing, food, health coverage, schooling, transport and debt payments in U.S. dollars, plus relocation and the professional and government charges tied to the application. Confirm current official fees when each step arises rather than relying on a figure quoted earlier. Keep this reserve outside the invested capital, and outside the business's operating float.
Three pockets, not one
Treat invested capital, the enterprise's working float and the family reserve as three separate pockets with three separate purposes. Businesses that quietly borrow from the family reserve tend to hide their own weakness until a lease renewal exposes it. Ask any adviser for an itemized scope and what happens if a review concludes funding is too thin to file.
Nobody can promise an approval, a processing time, or a return. The pocket that quietly disappears is health coverage. It is priced once, early, from a figure someone remembers, and then absorbed into a general living estimate where it stops being visible.
Price it against the actual household — ages, existing conditions, whether coverage comes through the business or is bought directly — and hold it as its own line, because it is rarely the number people expect. Do the same for schooling and for any debt still being serviced in Canadian dollars, where the payment moves with the exchange rate while the income does not.