The hidden cost of moving abroad

We packed up and moved our family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018. The plan was incredibly simple. We would stay for two years, get some sun, let the kids learn a bit of Spanish, and head back to Stockholm before life got too complicated. I am writing this six years later, still in Spain, looking out at the same mountains. I still play tennis badly and often, I still enjoy the wine, and we never moved back.

But there is a trap in moving abroad, and almost every expat I know falls into it. Year one is an extended holiday. Year two is when the bill arrives.

During those first twelve months, the novelty carries you. You treat the local supermarkets like an exotic museum. You eat dinner outdoors on a Tuesday simply because you can. Friends from home visit constantly, treating your house as their personal hotel, and you happily play tour guide. Everything feels incredibly light. Then the second year rolls around, and you realise this is no longer a holiday. It is just your life.

The paperwork tax and the slow fade

The first hidden cost is administrative. Moving across borders comes with a permanent, ongoing paperwork tax. In Sweden, you can sort your taxes, register a vehicle, and buy a house while sitting on the sofa with your phone. In Spain, you spend hours in poorly lit municipal buildings, holding a numbered paper ticket, trying to explain to someone who absolutely does not care that you want to register a car. You pay with your time, your patience, and your sanity.

But the heavier cost is the silence from home. Back in Stockholm, life goes on without you. For the first year, you are the exciting friend who moved abroad. By month eighteen, you are just the guy who is absent for Friday beers.

I have kept a written life plan since roughly 2010. I update it every year, rating my family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time out of ten. Somewhere around our third year in Marbella, I noticed the score I gave my friendships had steadily dropped. It wasn't that anyone fell out or got angry. We just faded. I would open Instagram and see my oldest friends at a dinner party I couldn't attend, discussing things I had no context for. You cannot maintain deep, thirty-year connections exclusively through text messages and occasional summer dinners when you fly back. You lose the casual intimacy of proximity.

You cannot maintain deep, thirty-year connections exclusively through text messages and occasional summer dinners when you fly back.

3,000 kilometres of guilt

Then there is the physical distance between generations. This is the part nobody warns you about when you are busy packing boxes and dreaming of the beach.

My parents are in Sweden, 3,000 kilometres away. They are getting older. When you live in the same city as your parents, you see the aging happen gradually. It blends into the background of Sunday coffees and quick visits. When you live in another country, you only see them a few times a year. The changes between visits hit you like a physical blow. You notice they walk a little slower, or that a sentence trails off. You start doing the brutal, depressing maths of how many actual days you have left in the same room as them. I struggle with the guilt of that distance constantly.

At the same time, I look at my kids. We moved them here to give them an adventure, but I sometimes wonder what we accidentally took away. They left their Swedish schools and their early friends. Now, they occupy a strange middle ground. They are not fully Spanish, but their connection to Sweden is mostly limited to summer holidays and the language we speak inside the house. I worry about their roots. I wonder if growing up in Southern Spain gives them a broader view of the world, or if it simply leaves them slightly untethered.

I'll be honest with you, I haven't got this figured out.

I do not regret staying past our initial two-year deadline. I love the pace of life here. I like the fact that I can step outside in December and feel the sun on my face. When Fredrik and I built Mediapilot in Stockholm, all my professional and social circles overlapped entirely. Years later, working on the commercial side at Happeo, I learned how to operate across borders. Today, building Anchor and Substrat from Marbella works perfectly well, and I have found a rhythm that suits me.

But I got the maths wrong for a long time. I thought moving abroad meant simply changing your background scenery while keeping everything else intact. I didn't realise it meant slowly dismantling one version of your life to pay for another. The cost of living in the sun goes far beyond the rent or the flights home. It is the missed birthdays, the fading group chats, and the quiet realisation that you can never fully belong to two places at once.