Thursday, October 15's office hours covered one skill I want you to drill: reading a county surplus list in ten minutes. Here's the rep, whether you were on the call or not. Pick the one county you're working. No county yet? Pick any county and start. Pull its surplus or excess-proceeds list from the clerk of court, tax collector, or treasurer site. Then answer the three Homework #1 questions (worksheet lives in the Classroom, Foundations 1 → Homework #1): 1. When was this list generated? 2. 2. How many entries have both a name and an amount? 3. 3. What is the oldest sale date on it? Post the county and your three answers in the pinned Homework #1 thread. Counties and dates only — never owner names, case numbers, or dollar amounts. And the pinned post's one rule stands: do not contact anyone on the list. Two things that will trip you: - A count is only as good as its parse. If the export stacks one field a full line above its row, a line-by-line read silently marries the wrong field to the wrong row. The Henry County teardown on October 15 showed that failure in the wild. - - A row with no amount is not always an open entry. On that same Henry County list, 10 of 149 rows carried a REDEEMED or NO PROCEEDS stamp instead of a figure — read the stamp before you count the row. If you get stuck, post what confused you in the same thread. Confusion is data. If you're in the First File in 7 Days sprint, run this rep on your sprint county. Education, not legal advice.

Here's what we covered tonight: - How to read a county surplus list in 10 minutes — the three Homework #1 questions: list date, record count, oldest sale - - Telling a candidate lead from a verified record - - One simulated worksheet walk-through, start to finish - - Live practice on members' own counties - - Open Q&A with Carl and Matt - - Kickoff of Friday's 7-day sprint: First File in 7 Days The worksheet is in the Classroom (Foundations 1 -> Homework #1). The sprint starts tomorrow morning at 10 AM ET with the first step posted in the community: https://www.skool.com/surplusfundssecrets/first-file-in-7-days-starts-friday-2 Questions from tonight, or anything you didn't get to ask? Drop them in the comments below — we'll keep answering in this thread.

Office hours with Carl & Matt, 7-8 PM ET. Join here: https://meet.google.com/fhc-kjjf-jeb Agenda: reading a county surplus list in 10 minutes (the three Homework #1 questions: list date, record count, oldest sale), telling a candidate lead from a verified record, a full worksheet walk-through, live practice on your counties, open Q&A, and the kickoff of Friday's 7-day sprint.

Tonight 7 PM ET: office hours with Carl & Matt Every Thursday, 7-8 PM ET, Carl and Matt open the room to every member. Tonight's agenda: - How to read a county surplus list in 10 minutes — the three Homework #1 questions: list date, record count, oldest sale - - Telling a candidate lead from a verified record - - One simulated worksheet walk-through, start to finish - - Live practice on members' own counties - - Open Q&A with Carl and Matt - - Kickoff of Friday's 7-day sprint: First File in 7 Days Event and join link: https://www.skool.com/surplusfundssecrets/calendar?eid=031b4c408cb64e49bfec8e274c95c658&eoid=1792105200 Drop a comment with the county you're working on and your number-one question — we'll answer as many as we can live.

I pulled Henry County's excess-funds list this morning — the county tax collector's Document Center, document 296 — and re-fetched it byte-identical to my earlier capture. Walked it end to end. Counts, dates and column names only below — no dollar figures, no owner names. The list itself One PDF, six pages, two sections. Columns: Parcel ID / Owner / Address / Sale Date / Excess Funds. The final page is a second section that adds a purchase-amount column on top of those five. If your county's list carries different fields, post which ones — I want to compare schemas across counties. What the numbers look like (counts and dates only) Across both sections: 149 rows with a sale date, spanning February 2020 to October 2026. By sale year: 2020: 4, 2021: 29, 2022: 32, 2023: 28, 2024: 19, 2025: 24, 2026: 13. Ten of the 149 rows carry no excess figure — they're stamped REDEEMED or NO PROCEEDS instead. That's the column that's easiest to skip, and skipping it means counting rows that are already closed out. The parse failure (the honest part) My first text extraction shredded the layout. The export stacks each address a full visual line above its owner row, so the address on line one belongs to the parcel on line two. Parse by visual line and you silently marry the wrong address to the wrong parcel — nothing warns you. My fix: ignore lines, rebuild every row from word coordinates, anchor each row on its parcel token, then read the flag column. I re-counted from the rebuilt rows: 149 dated rows, 139 with an excess figure, 10 flagged REDEEMED or NO PROCEEDS. Those counts came out of the corrected parse, not the broken one. Two ends of the lifecycle, one document The oldest entries still carrying an excess figure were sold on 2/4/2020, six years and eight months ago, and another on 11/3/2020. Newer entries include eight parcels sold 2/3/2026 and 3/3/2026 in the final section, and the newest rows in the file are dated 10/6/2026. I can't tell you from this PDF which entries still have open claims — there's no claim-status column, no interest field, no deadline dates. Claim status gets confirmed at the county, with the office that holds the funds — not from the PDF.