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Hypothetical example: Marisol Iglesias has run a garden centre near Lambton Shores for nine years and is opening a retail nursery across the border. She has a lease, a glasshouse to re-glaze, an irrigation fit-out to pay for, plant stock to buy, and a folder of quotations. What she does not yet have is a clear idea of which of those numbers an adjudicator will treat as invested capital and which will be politely set aside.
What ordinarily counts toward the investment
Capital includes money and other assets committed to the enterprise: the purchase or lease of premises and the improvements made to them, equipment and fixtures, initial inventory, licences and permits, professional fees incurred in setting the business up, and working capital held in the business account for its operations. Assets other than cash are valued at fair market value, so a greenhouse structure or delivery vehicle contributed from the Canadian business counts at what it is worth rather than at what it once cost. Borrowed funds can count where the investor is personally liable and the loan is unsecured or secured on assets she owns outside the business. What unites all of it is exposure: the money must be capable of being lost if the nursery fails.
What does not count, whatever it cost her
Several substantial numbers in Marisol's folder will not help. Money still sitting in a Canadian account, however clearly earmarked, has not been committed. A quotation is not an expenditure, and an option to lease is not a lease. Financing secured on the assets of the new business itself falls away, because the lender rather than the investor carries that risk. Personal and household costs — the family's rent across the border, a car for the children, living expenses during the first season — belong to the family rather than to the enterprise. Nor does her own unpaid labour count as capital, however many weekends the glasshouse takes. Setting these aside early is better than discovering at the application that the counted total is far smaller than the money spent.
Keep the paper as you go, because reconstructing it is worse
Pre-opening spending is exactly the spending nobody documents properly, and it is the spending most likely to be questioned. Marisol should open the business bank account before the first supplier is paid and route everything through it, keep the executed lease rather than the heads of terms, obtain invoices addressed to the enterprise rather than to her personally, and file the receipts for permits, insurance, signage, irrigation components and opening plant stock as they arrive. Where an asset moves from the Canadian company to the American one, a written transfer and a fair-market valuation should accompany it. Assembled in real time this is a folder; assembled a year later from memory and bank statements it becomes an expensive exercise in explaining gaps to someone entitled to disbelieve them.
What else is on your mind?
Is there one minimum investment that guarantees E-2 eligibility?Is holding money or owning an asset enough for E-2?Editorial source review: 2026-09-07. General preparation guidance, not an individual assessment.