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.

A surplus list is a lead source, not a source of truth. Counties publish on their own schedule, and the day after publication a list starts going stale. Three checks before you invest real time in any entry: 1. Check the list's own date. Not the day you downloaded it — the day the county generated it. Funds get claimed, escheated to the state, or consumed by junior liens while the PDF sits online unchanged. 2. Check the case file. The docket tells you whether a claim was already filed, whether an attorney has appeared, and whether the amount changed. The list is a snapshot; the docket is live. 3. Check the person. The name on the list is the owner as of the foreclosure — sometimes years ago. People move, marry, and pass away. If the owner is deceased, the claim belongs to the estate and the work changes completely. We run these three checks on every file before it counts as real inventory. Foundations 2 in the classroom walks a live file through the whole sequence.

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.

Every county formats its surplus list differently — PDF, spreadsheet, sometimes a scanned table. Underneath the formatting, seven fields do all the work: 1. Case or parcel number — your key to the court file. Everything gets verified against this. 2. Owner / defendant name — who the money belongs to. Watch for co-owners and estates. 3. Property address — how you confirm you have the right person later. 4. Sale date — starts most deadline clocks. 5. Surplus amount — what is actually being held. Treat it as unverified until you read the case. 6. Status — some lists still show funds that were already claimed or sent to the state. 7. Claim deadline — the field that kills files. If you work nothing else, work this one. A list missing the amount or the deadline is not useless — it is homework. The case file has both. The Starter Map (free download on the site) walks this anatomy in full, plus the exact search queries for finding lists. Grab it, then post the first list you pull.

A foreclosure sale is an auction. When the winning bid comes in higher than what the borrower owed, the extra money does not belong to the bank — and it does not belong to the county either. The debt gets paid. The costs get paid. Whatever is left is surplus, and in most states it is held by the court or county for the former owner to claim. Here is the part most people never hear: nobody's job is to chase the former owner down. The official notice often goes to the address they were just foreclosed out of. Then the money sits — sometimes for years, sometimes until a filing deadline quietly kills the claim. That is the entire business in one paragraph: find the money, find the person, prove the entitlement, file it right. Foundations 1 in the classroom walks the whole mechanism in five short lessons. Start there, then come back and introduce yourself on the pinned post.