Homework #2: the docket check on your three oldest Before the assignment, a promise that needs closing by name. On September 2, Carl posted a rep in the Start here thread: open your county's list from Homework #1, pick the three oldest sale dates, and for each one answer whether the docket shows any entry after the sale date. That comment included: "I'll mark the first 5 with what's actually checkable next." The marking never happened. Saying that plain, because a promise that quietly dies teaches the room the wrong lesson. What changed since: every member comment now gets a staff reply inside two hours, 9am to 9pm ET — no first-5 cap. Post your work and it gets answered. That is how the September 2 promise closes: not with five late marks, but with a standing rule that covers everyone. Now the assignment, formalized. Homework #2: the docket check on your three oldest. Take the county list from your Homework #1 pull. No pull yet? Homework #1 is up in the feed — one county list. Sort by sale date, oldest first, and take the top three. For each one, open the docket through whatever case search your county clerk publishes — and if the county doesn't publish one, say so; that counts as your answer. For each docket you can reach, two questions: can you find a deposit of sales proceeds — money in? And can you find anything like a disbursement or an order of distribution — money out? "Can't tell" counts if you show your work. Post your three lines below: county, case or parcel numbers, dates, and what you found. Never dollar amounts — the record carries those, we don't republish them. What this looks like when it's done: the Franklin teardown part 2 on September 16 ran this same check on the three oldest entries of that report. One showed a disbursement ordered in 2013. Two showed no visible disbursement entry more than twenty years after deposit. All three still printed on the county's August 20, 2025 report. The list tells you a case is still printing on it. The docket tells you what's been recorded against it.

Five steps. This is the only post you need to begin. 1. Understand the work in one paragraph. 2. When a property sells at tax sale for more than the debt owed, the extra money — surplus funds — sits with the county until the right person claims it. The work is records and process: find the case, verify the money, verify the person, move the claim correctly. If you want the why first, Foundations 1 in the classroom explains the mechanism in five short lessons — but you can start the rep below today. 3. See one worked example. 4. Foundations 2 in the classroom walks one real FCAR file end to end: find, verify, trace, contact, close. Fifteen minutes. This is what acceptable work looks like before you produce your own. 5. Do one exercise — Homework #1. 6. Pull one county surplus list. These are public records and free: search "[county] excess proceeds list" with site:.gov, or go to the clerk / tax collector site. Pick three entries. For each one, write three lines: the county, when the list was generated, and how you would verify the entry is still open. 7. Submit in the pinned Homework #1 thread. 8. Post your three lines per entry there, in the format shown in that thread. Never post claimant names or dollar amounts — counties and dates only. 9. We reply. 10. You will hear whether your rep meets the exercise criteria and exactly what to do next. One rep done properly beats ten half-read lessons. House rules: no earnings claims from anyone, no pitching or DM solicitation, education not legal advice, post your work. Questions on any step — ask below.

Most people in this space talk about AI like it's magic. In this video I`ll show you how it actually runs inside a real recovery operation, the boring, unsexy, day-to-day stuff that makes the difference between a business and a hobby. The part that'll surprise you: it's not about replacing the work. It's about doing more of the work that matters. Watch it, then tell us: what's ONE task in your week you'd hand off first if you could? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qm6ppRPwvk

Reading a real county tax deed sheet: what the Hillsborough County, FL clerk's weekly file actually contains New county, real list, walked in public. This one is Hillsborough County, Florida — the Clerk posts a "Weekly Tax Deed Spreadsheet" linked from hillsclerk.com/taxdeeds. We pulled it fresh for this post on 09/28/2026. First, what the file actually is. Two columns: case number and balance — the clerk's own labels. That's the whole sheet. No names, no addresses, which makes it a clean file for learning the mechanics, because everything you see is structural, not personal. The version we pulled carries a date stamp right in its first cell: "as of 09/25/2026." A list that tells you its own date tells you how fresh your read is. And that stamp matters here: the clerk's own title for it is "Weekly Tax Deed Spreadsheet," and we've seen an earlier-dated version of this same file with a different row count. By the time you read this, the file on the site may be a newer version with different rows and different counts. Every number below belongs to the 09/25/2026-dated version specifically. What the run found, counts only: 55 case rows on the sheet, and every single row carries a balance figure. Nothing blank. - 19 of the 55 rows sit at or above the county's larger balances. We publish counts, not amounts. That's a standing policy on per-case figures. - - The sheet spans several filing vintages — rows reaching back multiple years alongside the newer ones. We sorted by year prefix, which is what the run supported. We didn't check how long any balance has been sitting, so we don't know. - Now the part that matters more than the numbers: what this sheet doesn't tell you. It doesn't name a party — there are no names and no addresses in the file, only a case number and a balance figure. It doesn't show any filing or docket activity. It doesn't show a sale date. The list is the starting point, not the answer. - The rep, if you want it: pull the Hillsborough sheet yourself from hillsclerk.com/taxdeeds — expect the newest weekly version, not our 55 rows — and take one case number into whatever case-lookup the clerk offers. We haven't run that lookup step ourselves, so if it dead-ends, say so. Either way, post back what you actually found: case number, and what the lookup showed. Not what you hoped it would show. What it showed. - One honest note on scope: this run went fetch, parse, counts, sort — no party-level de-dup, no docket check on any of the 55 cases. A spreadsheet pull is the front half of the job, not the whole thing.

On September 1 Carl posted "Why this shop works attorney-first" (link below). This post is the working half of that idea — the division of labor, run as a checklist against your own week. The operator's half: - Pull the county list and read what it actually says. The seven fields worth checking — case or parcel number, owner or defendant name, property address, sale date, surplus amount, status, claim deadline — are in the September 18 checklist post, "The 7-field checklist, ready to save." - - Check the docket before anyone builds on a list entry. The list can lag the court record: in the Franklin teardown part 2 docket check (September 16), one case showed a disbursement order entered in March 2013 and still printed on the archived clerk report dated August 20, 2025. - - Locate the person. - - Prepare the file so counsel can move on it: organized, sourced, no gaps. Counsel's half is the shorter list, and the September 1 post already made the case for it. That post opens with the question that comes up in almost every intro — do you really need an attorney — and its answer is: "Need — sometimes no. Want — every time." The reasoning behind that answer — how filed claims get treated, what a bounced petition can cost, what several states have decided about non-attorney recovery help — is laid out there. Read it before you run the checklist above. The standing division of labor, from that post: "operators find the money, verify the file, and locate the person; licensed counsel files the claim." We teach the operator side — the finding, the verifying, the file prep — at fullcircleassetrecovery.com. The ask: what compliance question have you never gotten a straight answer to? Post it below. State-law nuance is Matt Joffre's lane, so those questions get tagged for him in this thread. And some questions have no operational answer at all — the standing rule from the September 1 post holds: nothing in this community substitutes for a licensed attorney in your state.