Why this manual exists
Our purpose: help people choose the right place in Florida, and be ready for what living here brings, with facts they can check.
Why
Florida isn't one place. The Panhandle runs on Central Time and gets freezing winter nights. The Keys are a chain of islands with one road out. Tampa Bay, the Heartland and Miami-Dade are different worlds. Most people pick a town from a vacation memory or a realtor's listing and learn the rest the hard way.
The information that would help is scattered across 67 counties and dozens of state and federal offices. Much of the free advice comes from people selling houses, insurance or moving services. And the first hurricane season catches newcomers without a plan, the right phone numbers or a way to look things up when the power and internet are gone.
This manual puts it in one place, written for the person deciding, not the person selling. Every fact carries a footnote so you can check it, and the emergency half works with no internet at all.
Who makes it
I've lived in Florida for 40 years of my adult life, in eight different places: Coral Gables, Fort Walton Beach and Destin (11 years there), Pasco County, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee, Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, and North Port, where I live today. Every move meant learning a new place: its weather, its costs, its storms and who to call.
For years I also sold books to schools for Books Are Fun, calling on thousands of schools all over Florida, from Jacksonville and St. Johns County to Broward and Miami-Dade, from Naples, Fort Myers, Arcadia and Sebring up through Sarasota, Manatee, Pasco, Polk, Lake and Sumter counties to Tallahassee and the Big Bend. I've seen most of this state town by town.
I built this manual to answer, in one place and with sources, the questions people moving here ask: where should I live, what does it really cost, and what do I do when a hurricane comes. I'm not a realtor, an insurance agent or a government office, and nobody pays to be in it.
The company
The Florida Living Manual is published by CHEWZI.NET LLC, a Florida limited liability company.
Independent, on purpose
- No business pays to be mentioned or ranked.
- No affiliate links: we earn nothing when you click a link.
- No ads.
- Not affiliated with the State of Florida, any county, FEMA or any agency named in it.
How it's made
This manual was researched and written with the help of AI tools. Every fact was then checked by opening the source it cites, and each one carries a footnote so you can check it yourself. How we check facts.