Guide · A2

Weighting for your situation

A country that tops someone else's list may be wrong for you — not because the data is fake, but because freedom is personal. Liberty Stack Ranking does not publish a universal league table. It publishes 238 territories scored on seven dimensions, then combines them with your weights into one ordered list.

Weighting is how the tool respects the thesis: structure where you live, where you build, and where you invest. This guide explains sliders, personas, renormalisation, and how to avoid common mistakes when you tune the model.

Sliders are priorities, not budgets

Each dimension (tax, money, economy, property, self, space, infra) has a weight you adjust in the Liberté comparator. Think of weights as relative importance, not percentages that must sum to 100 in your head.

If you set:

tax = 40
money = 30
economy = 20
everything else = 0

…the engine normalises to 40%, 30%, 20%, and 0% on the remaining axes. If you later add self = 10 without touching the others, all proportions shift — the total you typed is irrelevant; ratios are what count.

This matches real planning. Doubling how much you care about schooling and healthcare (infra) should reshuffle the list even if you never thought in "percentages."

Personas as starting points

Personas are preset weight vectors — useful when you are exploring before you know your exact numbers. They are not identities you must adopt. Typical patterns:

Persona tilt	Often emphasises	Useful when…
Tax / arbitrage	`tax`, sometimes `money`	Comparing personal tax residence and expat regimes
Entrepreneur	`economy`, `tax`, `money`	Founding or relocating a operating business
Family	`self`, `infra`, `space`	Schooling, healthcare, homeschool status, room to breathe
Asset / property	`property`, `money`, `tax`	Freehold, capital gains treatment, currency risk
Resilience	`space`, `money`, `property`	Density, imports, land, optionality

Liberty Stack also offers Business mode (/app?mode=business) with its own criteria and profiles (Solo, Employer, Holding). That mode answers "where to incorporate," not "where to live." Keep Liberté weights and Business weights separate in your head — conflating them produces incoherent decisions.

Building a stack-shaped weight profile

List your three layers before touching sliders:

Life layer

Where will you sleep most nights? Which rules apply to children, healthcare choices, and conscience? Push self and infra upward if mandates, conscription, or schooling law drive your move. Add space if physical margin — land, density, food security — matters more than nightlife.

Families comparing Uruguay and Portugal may weight infra and self heavily even when tax looks similar on paper.

Business layer

Where is the company registered, banked, and staffed? economy captures friction to start and run operations; tax captures personal and sometimes corporate undertones in Liberté mode. For incorporation detail, switch to Business mode and read country sheets — e.g. Estonia, Malta, USA Wyoming.

If your company is in Singapore but you live in Georgia, no single territory row describes you. Weight for the decision you are making now (residence vs hub), then rerun for the other layer.

Capital layer

Where are assets denominated and titled? Raise money for capital controls, banking friction, and currency stability. Raise property for freehold access, zoning, and building freedom. Cross-border stacks often split: low-tax residence plus property in a second jurisdiction.

Renormalisation in practice

Because weights are renormalised, zeroing out a dimension removes it entirely from the ranking. Leaving everything at defaults spreads importance evenly — which implicitly says all seven axes matter equally. That is rarely true.

Try deliberate extremes to stress-test:

Set one dimension to maximum, others to minimum — see who wins on that axis alone.
Reset to persona, then nudge one slider ±20% — see who enters or leaves the top ten.
Toggle expat regimes on tax if you are comparing UAE, Cyprus, or other territories with optional special regimes — eligibility changes the tax story.

Large rank jumps from small slider moves usually mean the mid-ranked territories are close substitutes on your current profile — not that the model is broken.

Correlation and decoupling

Some dimensions move together in the dataset: strong economy often pairs with decent infra in wealthy hubs; low tax havens may score lower on space. Liberty Stack has adjusted self, space, and infra over time to reduce blind correlation with economy and property — so personas actually reorder the map.

Still, if you double-count the same concern (e.g. bump both tax and money for "I hate paying the state"), you may overweight one underlying preference. Prefer the axis that matches the mechanism you fear: levies (tax) versus blocked transfers (money).

Common weighting mistakes

Chasing a single headline score. A territory at 8.2 global may hide a 2 on the axis you care about most. Always open the dimension breakdown.

Using Liberté weights for a company-only question. Use Business mode and its profiles; see methodology for CFC, enforcement, and holding criteria.

Ignoring variants. Portugal with NHR/IFICI-style treatment is a different tax line than default Portugal — toggle regimes when relevant.

Equating high infra with freedom. Good public schools and hospitals raise infra; they may coexist with high tax and mandates. Switzerland (Zug) and Hong Kong illustrate different trade-offs across axes.

Static weights across life stages. A solo founder and the same person ten years later with school-age children should not share one profile.

Workflow in Ranking

Choose a persona closest to your situation.
Adjust sliders to reflect non-negotiables (e.g. homeschool legality → self).
Scan the top 15 — note surprises, not just confirmations.
Open country business pages for hubs you might incorporate in.
Re-run with expat toggle and exotic filter if you use special regimes or rare territories.
Document your weight vector when comparing options with advisors — it clarifies what "best" meant.

Sensitivity checks before you commit

Before treating a ranking as a plan, run three quick sensitivity checks in Ranking:

Non-negotiable veto. Set every axis to zero except the one that would disqualify a move (e.g. homeschool legality → mentally filter banned regardless of weight). If a territory fails a veto, remove it even when it leads the weighted list.

±15% nudge. Increase your top axis by 15% of relative share and see who enters or leaves the top five. Stable shortlists are robust; fragile ones need more research.

Regime toggle A/B. For residence candidates with expat programmes, compare toggle on vs off. If your ordering depends entirely on a regime you may not qualify for, your real list is the toggle-off view until an advisor confirms eligibility.

Documenting weights for advisors

When you brief a lawyer or accountant, export your logic in plain language: "I weighted tax 40%, money 25%, economy 20%, self 15% because residence and banking matter more than schooling." That sentence prevents mismatched advice — professionals often assume tax-only optimisation unless told otherwise.