Investing while living abroad

When we packed up and moved the family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018, the plan was simple. We would stay for two years, enjoy the sunshine, eat well, and let me play a lot of bad tennis. I would manage my investments and business interests remotely. The physical move went exactly as planned. We found a house, unpacked our bags, and went to the beach. The financial move, however, was a disaster. I pictured managing my portfolio from a sunny terrace. I did not picture spending my first few months fighting with Swedish compliance officers over the phone.

If you have never moved your tax residency across a border, let me explain how your home bank will react. They panic. I logged into my Swedish brokerage account shortly after registering our new address in Spain, only to find a digital padlock on my portfolio. I called them up, assuming it was a routine security check. The clerk on the phone politely informed me that because I was no longer a resident, I could hold my existing positions, but buying anything new was strictly prohibited. They were entirely shutting me out of the market. You assume money is borderless until you actually try to cross a border with it. Suddenly, the simple act of putting some cash into a basic index fund required opening a local Spanish bank account, answering endless questions about my source of wealth, and providing legally translated tax returns. It took months of paperwork just to buy a stock.

The currency bleed

Once you have your accounts open, you hit the daily friction of currency mismatch. Most of my professional life has been tied to the Swedish Krona, from building Mediapilot in Stockholm to my work on the commercial side at Happeo. Even today, a fair amount of my capital is tied up in SEK. But down here on the coast, the supermarket wants Euros. My tennis coach wants Euros. When I buy a local property, the price is in Euros. For the first year, I ignored the mechanics of this. I just swiped my Swedish cards and let the bank handle the conversion in the background. That was an expensive mistake. If you earn in one currency and spend in another, you are quietly bleeding out through exchange fees and terrible spreads. The Krona has had some rough periods recently, and watching your purchasing power drop by roughly ten percent just because of macroeconomics is a frustrating experience. I had to learn to build a buffer, time my conversions, and hold local currency. It sounds obvious now, but when you are busy trying to get your kids settled in a new school, optimising your foreign exchange strategy usually sits at the bottom of the list.

You assume money is borderless until you actually try to cross a border with it.

Finding the right translator

I will not give you tax advice. I am completely unqualified, and the rules change faster than I can keep up with. Every country has its own logic. Spain views wealth and capital gains differently than Sweden does, and the penalties for getting it wrong are steep. The single best investment I have made since moving here was hiring a cross-border accountant who actually understands both systems. I did not want someone who only knew Spanish tax law, nor did I want a Swedish accountant who occasionally emails a guy in Madrid. I needed a person who could look at my early-stage angel investments, my property holdings, and the new companies I am building, and tell me exactly how both tax authorities would treat them. Good advice is expensive, but bad advice will cost you a fortune.

Managing my current portfolio from Marbella has forced me to be deliberate. Back in my early thirties, I travelled around the world for a stretch and was largely disconnected. I loved that freedom. Now, building Anchor, creating AI for alienated fathers, or working on Substrat, which builds infrastructure for AI builders, I have to think about the legal structure before I think about the product. The spontaneous, handshake-deal culture I grew up with in Stockholm does not easily survive a two-country tax setup. Everything has to be documented. Every transfer has to be clean and justifiable to two different governments.

The financial score

I keep a written life plan that I update every year. I score different categories out of ten: health, family and friends, work, personal time, and finances. I have been doing this since around 2010. Back then, my finance score was based entirely on raw growth and making deals. Today, a good portion of that score comes down to administrative peace of mind. Knowing that the accounting is clean, the currencies are hedged, and the brokers are happy gives me a much higher score than chasing an extra percentage point of return. I still have not got this completely figured out. I still get caught out by currency fluctuations occasionally, and I still dread the weeks before the tax deadline. We meant to stay for two years, and six years later, we are still here. The weather is excellent, the wine is great, but the paperwork never stops.