You think carefully about where you put your money. Asset classes, risk tolerance, and time horizons. You rebalance when the math changes.

Your professional relationships are an asset too. They generate deal flow, referrals, opportunities, and the kind of advice you can't buy. They took years to build.

And right now, you're running a lopsided portfolio.

That made sense in year one. Maybe year two. But you're five years in now. The question is whether the allocation still fits the reality.

Four flights a year back to wherever you came from. Maybe six. Conferences you can't skip. Client dinners that have to happen in person. Board meetings. The coffees that don't work over Zoom.

And you make those trips count. Three days on the ground turn into eight meetings, two dinners, drinks with the old team, breakfast with a former client, and lunch squeezed in with someone you've been meaning to catch up with for months. You land exhausted and slightly overfed, but the calendar was full.

Call it €1,200-1,800 per trip—flights, hotels, the meals you couldn't avoid. That's €6,000-10,000 a year to maintain relationships you built before you left.

That's not counting the days. Two days of travel. One day of jetlag. Another day to decompress. The week of compressed work before and after. The family time you traded.

You're investing serious resources into those relationships. And it's working, sort of. The network hasn't collapsed. People still take your calls. You're still in the loop, mostly.

But here's the thing: you're not in the room.

The first two years, it didn't matter. You'd just left. People remembered you. The relationships were still warm. Flying back felt like coming home.

Year three, something shifts. You still know everyone you knew. But you don't know the new people. The hire who joined after you left and is now running the department. The startup founder everyone's talking about, whom you've never met. The industry gossip that used to flow to you naturally now requires effort to extract.

In year five, the shift is harder to ignore. You find out about opportunities three weeks after they closed. Someone mentions a deal you would have been perfect for, but they didn't think of you—you weren't in the room when they were thinking about it. Your former colleague changed companies. You heard about it on LinkedIn, not over drinks.

You're still connected, but you're not current. The context you shared is slowly becoming history.

This isn't failure. It's physics. Relationships require proximity, repetition, and shared experience. You can simulate some of that with flights and Zoom calls. But you can't simulate being there.

Your network back home is depreciating. Maybe 10% a year, maybe 15%. You're spending €8,000 annually to slow the decline. That's a reasonable choice—those relationships have real value. But it's worth being honest about what you're actually buying: maintenance, not growth.

Now look at the other side of the ledger.

You've lived here three years. Five years. Maybe longer. You've met some people—school parents, neighbours, the occasional introduction at a dinner party. A few have become genuine friends.

But professional relationships? The kind that generates deal flow, referrals, and opportunities? The people who think about business the way you do?

You might know three of them. Maybe five. Not because they don't exist, but because you haven't invested in finding them.

The ratio is probably something like 90/10. Ninety percent of your professional relationship energy goes into maintaining networks in cities you left. Ten percent into building networks where you actually live.

In year one, that made sense. You were just arriving. The old network was still warm. Building here didn’t seem that important.

Year five? The Costa del Sol allocation deserves examination.

Let's be specific, because "the Costa is growing" meme is meaningless.

Málaga city is the institutional story. Google's Safety Engineering Center opened at Muelle Uno in November 2023—that's the VirusTotal team plus growth programs for European startups. Oracle, Vodafone, and Huawei have expanded operations. The Parque Tecnológico de Andalucía — Andalucía Technology Park — now employs 22,000 people across 630 companies. BIC Euronova, the incubator founded in 1991, sends two startups annually to Berkeley SkyDeck with a $200,000 investment.

That's real infrastructure. Real capital. Real ecosystem. Forty-five minutes east of Marbella.

The western Costa is different. Less institutional, more individual. Marbella Tech Angels connects 160+ investors and founders through a private LinkedIn group. Global Super Angels Club, headquartered here, has 70+ international angels writing checks of €100,000-500,000. The entrepreneurial density exists—it's just scattered across home offices in Nueva Andalucía, Estepona, and Benahavís, invisible to each other.

The raw material for a professional network is here. What's missing is the collision infrastructure.

This isn't about abandoning your old network. That would be stupid. Those relationships have value, and some will remain important for decades.

The question is whether 90/10 is still the right ratio.

Consider three scenarios:

You're here temporarily. Three years, maybe five, then back to London or Dubai or Singapore or wherever the next chapter takes you. In that case, keep flying. Maintain aggressively. The Costa is an interlude, not a base. Enjoy the weather.

You're here indefinitely, and your work travels with you. Clients in multiple time zones, location-independent income, and no anchor pulling you back. This is where the calculus changes. Your old network will continue fading regardless of how often you visit. The question is what you're building in parallel.

You're building something that needs local capital, talent, or partners. Málaga's ecosystem is real but concentrated. The western Costa has wealthy individuals but fewer structured collision points. Worth knowing the difference.

Most of us live in the second scenario without fully admitting it. We're here for good, more or less. Our work doesn't require us to be in any specific place. And we've quietly accepted a thinner professional network as the price of quality of life.

That was true in 2019. It may not be true in 2025.

If you've never been to Málaga's tech ecosystem, it's worth a visit before you decide it's too far.

Innovation Campus (Calle Álamos 7, fifth floor) runs €19+VAT day passes. The Startup Grind Málaga chapter hosts periodic fireside chats with founders and investors—no events scheduled for December, but worth joining the mailing list.

For the western Costa, Los Naranjos Golf Club in Nueva Andalucía offers a Business Club membership with conference facilities and explicit networking programming. If you're looking for collision points that fit around school runs and client calls, it's the only golf club on the coast built for that purpose.

Neither of these is a silver bullet. But they're the kind of small reallocations that shift the ratio over time.

Last Friday, we asked readers to reply with ZONE and their town. The responses clustered predictably: Marbella, Nueva Andalucía, Estepona, San Pedro, Benahavís. Founders, consultants, remote executives. Same profile, same observations about professional isolation, same habit of flying back instead of building forward.

We're considering putting together something small in the new year. A few groups of up to eight people, no more, meeting regularly over coffee. Same people each time, so relationships actually develop. Everyone brings one live operational question: tax structure, contractor pipeline, cross-border compliance, whatever's actually on your desk. No pitches. No presentations. No one is selling anything. Someone from my team or I will facilitate the initial meetings to get things running smoothly.

The idea is simple: repeated exposure to the same business-minded people, in a format that's useful first and social second, might actually build the kind of network that matters. The kind you used to have before you left.

If that sounds interesting, reply REALLOCATE and let us know where you're based.

No commitment. We're just gauging whether there's enough interest to make it worth organising.

"¿En qué sector trabajas?" — What sector do you work in?

"Trabajo en remoto, pero mis clientes están en varios países." — I work remotely, but my clients are in several countries.

You moved here because the quality-of-life equation made sense. Space, weather, cost, and the ability to work from anywhere.

But quality of life includes professional satisfaction. And professional satisfaction usually requires people who understand what you do, who challenge your thinking, who send you opportunities, and ask for help in return.

Those people are here. You're just not investing in finding them.

The old network is fading, whether you fly back or not. The new one won't build itself. And somewhere between those two facts is an allocation decision worth making consciously, rather than by default.

Nearly there — A. and the power networking Waypoint Sur team

With Waypoint Sur, you can always expect plain-English guidance to land, settle, and thrive on the Costa del Sol—work, schools, healthcare, visas, taxes, home, and daily life.  
Made Mostly Under the Costa del Sol Sun. 💛