If you joined this month, this is the one thread to work through. The path is the same for everyone: Foundations 1, then Foundations 2, then Homework #1. No shortcuts, and no prior experience needed. Homework #1 is a list pull — you take one county's surplus list and read it line by line. What a good Homework #1 submission looks like — fictional example only: County: Adams County (made up) List date: June 3, 2026 (made up) Rows I checked: 12, owners written as Owner A / Owner B, balance listed column noted but not quoted That's the whole shape. County, list date, what you saw. Post your county and your list date in the Homework #1 thread — never names, never case numbers, never amounts. We keep claimant details out of this room on purpose. Everyone who joined this month: work Foundations 1 and 2 first if you haven't, then post your three lines in the pinned Homework #1 thread. It takes one sitting. The Homework #1 thread is pinned at the top of the community.

A question that comes up in almost every intro: do you really need an attorney to claim surplus funds? Need — sometimes no. Want — every time. Here is the operator math: Claims filed by counsel get treated differently. Clerks answer their calls, technical defects get cured instead of denied, and hearings move. A petition bounced on a defect can cost months — and in states with short claim windows, months you do not have. Several states have also decided this for you: non-attorney recovery help is restricted or fee-capped, and doing it wrong is not a business risk, it is a legal one. The rules are state-by-state and they are not suggestions. And the person you are helping deserves it. Surplus claimants have already been through a foreclosure. The cleanest thing you can hand them is a properly filed claim, not an experiment. So the model we teach — and run ourselves — is: operators find the money, verify the file, and locate the person; licensed counsel files the claim. That division of labor is Foundations 1, lesson five. It is also why the house rule says education, not legal advice. Nothing in this community substitutes for a licensed attorney in your state.

Baltimore City is sitting on an excess-funds list with 2,852 records on it. This is a real pull from the city's own public file. Every row is a tax sale where the paperwork never reached the person it belonged to. The sheet in this video shows the 12 largest records, sorted by amount — all real, all public at baltimorecity.gov. This is the work: pull the list, qualify the claim, find the person, prove who they are, do the paperwork, follow it through. Watch a real recovery business run.

Not a machine video this time — the story underneath it. Every county list is full of people who were never told the money was theirs. That is why this work exists. Music is ours too: "Found Money", Full Circle brand lane, written and produced in-house. Then go pull your county's list. It's public.

This is the real Franklin County Clerk of Courts excess sales proceeds report — 302 cases holding non-zero balances, printed August 20, 2025. Every frame of this video was captured and assembled by AI. The list is public. Anyone can pull it. The craft is knowing which row is worth the docket pull. Sound on — that's our own track under it. Watch a real recovery business run.