Pinned
11d •
First File in 7 Days starts Friday
Starting this Friday, Oct 2, we're running a free 7-day sprint: First File in 7 Days. The goal is simple. By next Thursday you'll have one sourced file, or a clearly documented blocker, and a sharper question. It follows the sprint on page 18 of the Starter Map. How it works: - Each morning at 10 AM Eastern I post that day's step here in the community. - - Do the step, then drop a one-line update in the comments of that day's post. Counties and dates only. Never owner names, case numbers or dollar amounts. - - Day 7 (Thursday, Oct 8) ends at office hours, 7–8 PM Eastern, with Carl and Matt, live on Google Meet. Bring your file. What you need: the free Starter Map (surplusfundssecrets.com/starter-map), 30 to 60 minutes a day, and one county. Comment "in" below and name the state you're starting in. This is a research schedule, not a promise of a claim, a recovery or income.
Pinned
Aug 28 •
Homework #1: pull one county list
This week's assignment, straight from the pinned post: 1. Pick ONE county. Your own, or any county in Florida, Texas, or Georgia — big auction states with public lists. 2. Find its surplus or excess proceeds list. Three ways: search "[county name] excess proceeds list" with site:.gov attached; go to the county clerk of court site and look under foreclosure sales; or check the tax collector / treasurer page for tax deed surplus. 3. Open it and answer three questions: When was this list generated? How many entries have both a name and an amount? What is the oldest sale date on it? Post your answers below — the county, your three answers, and anything that confused you. Confusion is data; the first list is the hardest one you will ever read. One rule: do not contact anyone on the list. That is not this assignment.
Pinned
Aug 23 •
Start here: your first rep, one evening
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.
18h •
One page, 28 rows, and two different time markers
Denton County, Texas. The District Clerk publishes an excess tax funds file — one page in the version I pulled today: cause number, name, deposit amount, an "Excess Fund Date" column, plus a footer. With just four columns it teaches something worth practicing: the rows carry two different time markers, and they mean different things. The two markers: 1. The year in the first segment of the cause number, before the first dash — written full or two-digit on this page (2012-0756-16, 18-9095-362). 2. The date in the Excess Fund Date column. Those are not the same event. And the gap between the prefix year and the excess date is not constant — on the three rows below it runs from five to nine years. Three examples straight off the page: - Cause 2012-0756-16 — prefix year 2012, excess fund date 5/5/2021. Nine years between the two. - Cause 18-9095-362 — prefix 2018, excess dated 9/21/2023. Five years. - Cause 19-7161-16 — prefix 2019, excess dated 9/30/2026. Seven years. Now the exercise. The list is sorted alphabetically by name, not by date. So if your method is "start at the top," you're working the list in an order that tells you nothing about age. Before you touch a row, sort by the Excess Fund Date column yourself. And notice what the four columns do not include: any claim-status field. A 2021 excess date on a 2012-prefix cause number is a fact about this page, not a fact about availability. One way to go deeper is to take a cause number to the district clerk's records search and read what the docket shows — the same docket-check rep as Homework #2. Your rep for today: open the Denton file, sort the 28 rows by Excess Fund Date, then take the oldest-dated row that is NOT one of the three examples above and run its cause number through the district clerk's records search. Post in the comments on this post: the cause number, and what the most recent docket entry shows. No dollar amounts — this stays a counts-and-dates exercise. Education, not legal advice. Claims are prepared and filed by independent licensed attorneys.
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2d •
1|A rep you can grade yourself against
1|One of your own posted a real rep this week, and it's worth walking file by file. 2| 3|Percy posted his Homework #2 docket check this week — three Hamilton County, Ohio files as he posted them (dates below are MM-DD-YYYY, none verified by me against the docket). His dates and case numbers are as he posted them; where I've condensed his summary, I say so. Same county, three files that look like three different points in the distribution sequence — and only one of the three, A 1902132, has the record's own words on the board. That took a nudge. 4| 5|- A 1505764, foreclosure judgment 12-06-2017. Per his post: a motion to distribute was filed 02-04-2021, and an entry he described in his summary as resolving the distribution (that's his summary — exact wording and entry date not posted; no read date on this line). 6| 7|- A 1900394, foreclosure judgment 03-10-2020. Motion to distribute filed 03-10-2026, as he posted it — same month-day six years apart, worth confirming against the docket before relying on it. Separately: no ruling entry as of his 10-06-2026 read. 8| 9|- A 1902132, foreclosure judgment 11-05-2020. No motion to distribute in his pull. What he identifies as the last entry in his pull: a notification entry docketed 04-05-2021 (no read date on this line, same as A 1505764). The date comes from his summary line, not from quoted docket text — the wording is in point 2 below. 10| 11|What this rep got right — and what tightened after a nudge: 12| 13|1. He dated the A 1900394 line — 10-06-2026 — on the file showing no ruling entry as of the day he read it. My read: a docket reading means something anchored to the day you read it. Date every line with the day you read it, not just one. 14|2. On A 1902132, my read is that his summary tracked the entry, and I pushed him in-thread to post the docket's own wording rather than his summary. He posted the wording he identifies as that entry, name redacted: NOTIFICATION TO JUDGMENT DEBTOR OF EXCESS FUNDS. SERVICE SENT BY REG MAIL TO [name redacted]. That line is as he posted it in the thread. My read is the entry type matched his summary; the date did not come along with it. And the same discipline is why the 2026 date on A 1900394 stays open: its month-day mirrors the 2020 judgment date, a possible copy-forward error worth ruling out. Only the docket's own entry settles it.
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