Lived in the GVRD. Thought "this is way too expensive, everyone is saying Alberta is so much cheaper" so we put things in storage and went to Alberta. Six months in, we discovered...

• Car insurance in AB is 3 to 5 times what we were paying in BC and we get less coverage.
• Rents are only marginally lower than what we'd pay on a similar property in the Fraser Valley
• House prices were only marginally lower in the Calgary region vs where we bought in BC
• Winter in Alberta sucks big time

After six months we moved back to BC. The small difference in housing costs made so little impact to our monthly COL, that it wasn't worth it. We paid WAY more for car insurance and electricity - so much so that any savings we saw in housing costs were totally eclipsed by other expenses.