Transcript of Buy Money at a Discount: Surplus Proceeds Explained (Christopher Craig)

Welcome to the LevelUp podcast. I'm your host, Paul Alex. I went from being a cop to an eight-figure entrepreneur that helps average people like you and me make money every single day. I created this podcast to help you get motivated and to crush your goals. Let's win together. Remember, I have your six. Get ready to LevelUp right now. Hey, guys, and welcome back to LevelUp podcast. This is Paul Alex, and today we have a phenomenal guest. He goes by the name of Christopher Craig. So, Christopher Craig is a good friend of mine, and he's going to be speaking at Swype to Freedom in Dallas on September 6. But what's very unique about Chris is the way he figured out how to make some good money in 2025. And guys, just imagine. Okay, let me paint the picture here. Imagine if you guys had a neighbor and they just foreclosed on their house. They lost everything. And you've been neighbors with them for the past 10 years, and they don't have a single dollar to their name. But what if you knew one strategy, that you can actually help them go back on their feet, put some money in their pocket, and in exchange, you guys get paid as well?

Sounds pretty interesting, right? Well, Chris is actually going to go ahead and break that down on this interview. And he's also a military veteran. Thank you for your service, Chris. Chris, welcome to the show, brother.

Thank you, Paul. Thank you for having me. Dude. It's a pleasure. It's exciting.

I'm excited for this talk just because, dude, we've been talking behind the scenes for a while now. And we met at the charity, dude, about a month ago now, right? The Paul Hutchinson Charity, dude. Swipe Sign of Freedom. Yeah. His book launch. Yeah, his book launch, dude. It was great.

Very small, like 40, 50 people, if that.

Very intimate, dude, but it was impactful.

Very impactful, yeah.

It was, man. Chris, for the viewers that don't know you, man, who is Chris Craig?

Hey, I'm just an everyday average Joe Shit, the ragman. Got out of high school. I was a straight A student in high school. But college that I didn't think was for me. I enlisted in the Marine Corps, 18, and then off Of all the Marine Corps songs, off I went to boot camp. I was an open contract kid. I didn't get to choose my job. I became a communicator, or that's what they selected for me, communications. From San Diego, 29 Palms. From 29 Palms, Lackland Air Force Base, because I graduated number two in my class for the school, so I got to go to carry on school. So I got to go to carry-on school. And then my duty station after that was Guantanamo Bay. Spent a year down there during the Cuban and Haitian migrant crisis from 94, 95. Wow. And so that was then been on a few Coast Guard cutters, chasing counter drug interdiction and doing that all thing. Marines are the gunslingers, not so much the Coast Guard. They're doing some good Yeah, put in some work. And then after Guantano Bay is Camp Lejeune, and then finish my active duty and a couple of years in the reserves, and then into the civilian life, basically.

Worked for Pacific Bell. I've had a lot of different jobs, a lot of different experiences, from blue collar to white collar, I guess. I've also had my trials and tribulations. But basically, I was a tech worker coming out. Coming out of the Marine Corps in 1997, that was our dot com boom, like the mid '90s. We had technology. I mean, think of this. Amazon was just coming on when their stock price was four or five bucks a share. Which is insane. Microsoft was only like 20 something a share back then. It was the Internet age. Then all of a sudden, we had the dot com crash of 2000. I When I was working, I don't think I had a job longer than eight months because companies were knocking me. If you were a tech worker, Hey, come work for us. We'll give you a stock options. We'll double your salary or your hourly wage. It was like when you're 22, 23 years old, I was making $100,000 a year in my 20s.

You're getting paid.

Paid. I had three jobs one time paying me over 80 grand a year.

What year was that?

This would have been '97, '98. Oh, dude, you were bawling.

Yeah, you were bawling.

2000.

And you were a single guy.

Single guy. You can only imagine. Crushing it. From a perspective of going from $14,000 a year in the Marine Corps. The first thing was I was going to be a cop initially. Chp, test it out for these departments because that's the natural progression of military is law enforcement.

Absolutely.

They were like, one department was like, Oh, we'll pay you $22,000 a year to start. It's like, okay, the phone company was offering me $60,000 of start. Where am I going to go? Exactly. It's a phone company. So, yeah, I went back to California, where I'm from, and worked for Pacific Bell. San Mateo is where I was at, so South Bay. Then Got fired from that job because my boss was telling me I had to go on spikes. I was a little bit of a hard head. So he wanted me to climb up on a pole, spike, splice a 2,000 pair cable in the rain. I'm like, Dude, I got a bucket I got equipment. I just drive it through the mud. Well, it got stuck in the mud, so then they fired me for that.

Yeah.

Which getting fired on my first job out of the military was probably one of the greatest things ever. Why is that? Because then I got a better job.

Okay. Was it because of the military? You had that level of confidence that you were like, You know what? I got a little chip on my shoulder. I could do it all.

I think you learn how to adapt and overcome, and you basically say, Look, I've got tools in my bucket, and I'm going to use them. You can't tell me not to use a tool that I have. I had this bucket truck, and it made it down there. I got the job done, but on the way out, it got stuck, like literally 30 feet from the road.

Yeah.

And so what they got mad is I utilize the next tools around me. There was a guy with a tractor down below, another contractor doing something, building a house, whatever that I recall, said, Hey, can you come help me out and pull this truck out? That's what he did. He pulled the truck out, but it bent the front vendor a little bit. So I drove the truck back to the yard and, Hey, why is the vendor bent? Because I got stuck and I had some other guy pulling me out with a chain. Big deal. It's an old truck. So they didn't like that. So anyway, In the union, in my experience, if you worked with efficiency and you were fast, they didn't like that. And so they wanted you to work slow to preserve the status quo. So I felt like the union back then was not for me, and it only protected the lazy. Where it's at today, I don't know because I've been out of that job thing for a long, long time, 30 years. Oh, yeah. So anyway, What have I done? In 2000, dot-com bubble hit. I was out of work.

Tech workers were a dime a dozen. I went into real estate.

What made you go into real estate at that time?

Actually, it was a friend of a friend said, Hey, I got to introduce you to this guy named Douglas McCabe out of Portland, Oregon. I was living in Portland at the time, and he needs a database built for foreclosures. So I was like, I'm not a coder or a programmer or a software guy, but I knew them. So I called my other buddy and said, Hey, what would you charge me to build this database? And he was like, 10 to 20 grand. I'm like, Perfect. So I went down to McCabe. I said, $80,000. And then he goes, You know I said, You know what? I think it'd cost me 10 to 20. I said, You're right. It will cost you 10 to 20. I'm just trying to make a few bucks, too. He liked that. I was transparent and honest with him. He says, Why don't you come work for me? I'll teach you foreclosures. I'll teach you the mortgage business. He taught me to teach you everything I know about real estate. He called himself back then as today the foreclosure guru. He'd been doing foreclosures since 1986. Wow. Now he's pushing 80. He's in his 70s.

We're still good friends. We have a business together. Basically, at the end of the day, is build your relationships because that's what life's about, is building meaningful relationships. Absolutely.

It's about good business. Good business. Your network, your environment.

Yeah, your network's your networth. Yeah.

I'm a big believer in that as well, man.

That's where I started learning about pre-foreclosures. Then the wholesale business was back 2000, 2001. Doug taught me the mortgage business, but I had to go get trained by a different mortgage company for about five or six weeks. He goes, Let them train you, then come work for my mortgage company. It was all about learning how money works and the flow of money, how it hits the real estate market. Got my education in that sense. We were probably doing three, four, five deals a week because the foreclosure market today is... The landscape is much different today than it is yesterday. Twenty years ago, we didn't really have internet data available to track foreclosures. You You literally had to go down to the county recorder and look at microfish and search for the notice of defaults and notice of trustee sales. Then you would go and knock on the door and then try to negotiate with the homeowner and try to help them or buy their house, or you would figure it out. There was only about five guys in Portland, Oregon that did this in the early 2000s. I mean, nowadays, you've got 300, 400 people in one market chasing the same off-market property list, on-market property list.

It's armies out there today. The competitive environment is much harder. I have stayed in that lane for a long, long time. Then fast forward, 2004, with five, we've got the market starting to tank. It ran up for a couple of years. 9/11 happened. When 9/11 happened, that was the first time we actually saw interest rates drop from seven and three quarters down to below 6%. No one had ever seen that in the history of mortgages. They'd never been that low. It was funny because I was a loan officer then. I was like, people, Hey, they refined six months prior to the 9/11. They're like, Can we refi again and get that lower rate? I'm like, Absolutely. Back then, you'd make a point, point, point and for their loan amount. But I think what we got to look at today is that house 20 years ago was only $200, $250, $1,000. Now, today, that same house is $700, $750, $1,000.

Dude, it's closer probably to a mill.

Depending on the market you're in. Now we're back up to those interest rates. Same house, higher value, nobody can afford it. Or they'll qualify them with some two, one buy-down rate. They got a low interest rate a couple of years ago. Now it's 7%, they can't afford the payment. The foreclosure storm, if anybody has not looked at it, foreclosures are up 28% to 32% in most jurisdictions across the US. The storm's coming, it's just in its infancy. Give it another six months, I think we'll see foreclosures double again. It's technology. There's a lot of factors pushing people out of the workforce, but wages haven't really gone up, too.

The fear of AI right now. I mean, AI is growing, bro. It's growing.

It's growing fast. Faster than we can blink.

It's replacing jobs. It is.

Yeah.

So let's get to the part of your story, brother, where essentially you learn how to make money with foreclosures and how you were able to build now over 10 million with foreclosure surplus proceeds.

That's collectively over the lifetime of the proceeds cases that I've done or claims. What it is, is if you owe the bank 100 grand, and let's say your house is worth $300,000. In today's foreclosure market, there's going to be an auction. It's going to be a judicial sale, meaning it's a court-ordered sale or it's a non-judicial where it's just they're filing paperwork saying, Here's your auction date. It's in the county recorder, the public registers office. Then they'll have a public auction, usually at the county courthouse, literally on the courthouse steps. If it's not a rainy day, it's outside. If it's a rainy day, it's inside. There'll be a crier who works for the foreclosing trustee, and the trustee will say, open the bid up at, let's say, 100 grand. Let's say that house sells. I mean, in today's market, it's mostly hedge funds that are buying foreclosures. It's hard for a guy like me to go buy foreclosures today and make money on them because they're bidding up to 90 to 95% of current market value. If you're a small guy with just half a million bucks in cash, you're going to make $30,000 on a huge half a million dollar risk.

Or let's say you buy the house for $250, it's worth $300. After your sales costs and everything, you're going to make $20,000, and now nothing's even selling. The surplus is the difference between what they owe the bank and what it sold for at auction. If the bank takes it back, there's no surplus. If it goes what they call third party, that means an investor bought it at the auction. That's called a third party sale. There's surplus. Most of the time, yes, but sometimes no, it just depends on the property. But I've seen in the It lasts two, three weeks, surplus cases above $200,000. And so what happens is the homeowner themselves does not know about that surplus because it's like an esoteric secret market. By the time they lose their house, within 10 days, usually the deed transferring the house from the bank to the investor from the sales, the trustee's sale takes about 10 days. Once that's recorded, the eviction process starts. Depending on where you're at, the jurisdiction you're in, the municipality, the county, the state, you could be on the street in 15 days after that. It goes pretty quick. Most of them has taken about 30 days.

But people, it's more their mental health at that point. They're stressed, they got depression, they got drugs, alcohol, divorce, I mean, death. I mean, all those different factors of why they're in their position they're at. All the legal mail that comes in. So they're going to get a letter from an attorney's office that they're most likely just going to throw away that's telling them, Hey, you might have surplus proceeds to claim. They never tell you how much.

Wow.

Most people will open up the letter and they'll I don't know what this is, and they throw it away. Let's say the guy has got $150,000 of surplus coming. He has no clue. I would sit at the auction, and I will listen to the sales data. I go physically to the auction. It usually only lasts 30, 40 minutes from 10: 00 AM to maybe 11: 00 AM, depending on where you're at, 9: 00 AM to 10: 00 AM. I'd listen for the opening bid, and I'd see who bought. If there was a surplus, I'd immediately go knock on that person's door the day of the sale, leave them a little note, handwritten note. Sometimes I type up a general thing and write in some numbers. Your house opening bid was this, sold for that, you're entitled to this much money. Call me if you'd be interested in an advance on these funds. I don't think I'd ever had anybody not call me because they're broke, they're going to get evicted, they have no money for first, last, and deposit. They might not have a car, but offering them cash for their surplus funds, like littlest, is buying money at a discount, guaranteed money at a discount, it changes their whole scope in life.

Now they can move on. Most of the time, it's a negotiation with whatever you're going to give them, whatever they're going to take. Because the process to get it released in the court system could be 60 days, it could be nine months. You got somebody that has no money. They are happy to take whatever they can get in the next week. Now they got food on their table. Basically, they're moving on with their life, and whatever bad chapter they just went through, they want to forget about it and move forward. That's what the surplus proceeds opportunities about. Helping people, put money in their pocket, changing lives, and making money yourself.

That's amazing, man. You learned about this what year?

2004.

Since 2004, you've been doing this for almost 21, 22 years now.

There's been a lag because when the market's doing well, there's not a lot of foreclosures, so there won't be a lot of surplus. Let's just say from probably 2000, From about 2006, which was the crash started. Everybody owed more on their house than what it was worth, so you saw no surplus cases. The market didn't start going back on its feet It was still about 2012, '14. But because the market was doing so well from '12 and '14, equity was still building up. The real estate market, the economy was generally doing well. You won't see a lot of foreclosures. Now people have equity, their heads in the sand, and we have a lot of foreclosures. We have the perfect mix to jump back in the game because the gold rush for this is now and moving forward for probably the next two or three years.

Wow. So what would you say to somebody? Let's say, because my audience, we have about four million downloads a month currently right now. We just got ranked top four in all categories as well. Very thankful for you guys, you guys watching this. So Chris, majority of our viewers and listeners, they're actually beginners. This almost sounds like it's too good to be true. It really does, man, because it's just saying it like buying money at a discount, right? And then most people are like, so what's the actual work? Well, I mean, obviously, there's more to it than just the steps of just offering somebody, hey, we're going to pay you this much to obtain this much of your money, right? So If someone, let's say, wanted to get advice from you, what would be a good amount for them to have saved up before starting a venture like this? And we're talking about somebody who, let's say, is a blue-colored worker, like myself, Coming from law enforcement, and I have, let's say, $10,000 saved up. Is $10,000 worth going ahead and investing into something like this?

$10,000 could be a good start, but better yet, I could partner with you and you don't even have to use your own money. You could make money off my money just by bringing me the lead, and then I'm going to coach you through it on the whole entire process.

Okay. People are able to go ahead and actually partner up with you, which is what you do now, and you partner up with people that are interested in actually learning this concept. They're able to go scalp for the deals at these auctions, and then you're able to then leverage your You get the money, and you guys basically partner up on the deals. Correct.

Wow, that's amazing. They earn a fee immediately up front. Now, I have to wait because you have to go litigate some of this stuff. It's going to get released through a court process, and that could take a couple of months. It could It's going to take many, many months. It just depends. There's a lot of factors that are probably not relevant for this talk today. But it's more of leverage my knowledge because I've been doing this. I had to figure this out on my own. Now, I used to do it in a manner where I would go knock on the person's door. I'd say, just for telling them about their money, it's like searching for an air. You tell them about it, you say, Hey, I know where there's a pot of money for you, but I'm not going to tell you unless you sign a contract and give me 10%, 15, or 20, or 30% of the funds. I used to do it that way. In California, Nevada, Arizona, and other states, they pretty much outlawed that. Now, they haven't outlawed it completely. They just said, You can take a fee I'm not telling them about it, but it's limited to $1,500 to $2,500 per case.

I had to go litigate those. We got stung on one in Nevada and Las Vegas, where I live, and we didn't get any money at all. It cost me $15,000 on attorneys fees 20 years ago, and we rolled a donut on that. I went back to the attorneys and said, Guys, we have to come up with a better system. That's when the attorneys I had at the time, they were the largest foreclosing attorneys on the West Coast. They represented Countrywide Bank, Bank of America, US Bank. They were the firm. I said, I better put these guys on my payroll and have them work for me because they're tied directly to the bank. That means they're holding the funds. With that, they said, Listen, the statutes and everything are not favorable for you just to get a percentage of their money. Because what did you really do? You didn't pay any consideration. You just told them about something. There's a contract here that lacks consideration. He goes, We'll give us a few weeks and we'll draft you up a series of documents, contracts, where you're going to buy the It's a right to the claim. They're owed 100 grand, maybe we give them $20,000 today.

It's a contractual right. It's a property right at that point. We bought the claim. After we did that, I think we had one challenge, and we won that It was in court, and then it was just like the game was on. What happened in '04, '05, surplus proceeds, we did millions of dollars in surplus, millions of dollars. One One claim we paid $83, $84,000 for, for $353,000. Wow. Took nine months to get the money because there was multiple claimholders. I don't remember. It's a long time ago, so I don't remember the details. But by buying the guy's claim, it changed the landscape. That means the judges had no problem with it. The foreclosing trustee didn't have an issue with it. Because the guy already got his money, he already left. He's gone. We couldn't even get a hold of him. When we say buying real money at a discount, we know there's real money there because there's an overbid, there's an excess, there's a surplus of the amount of money that was owed in excess of what the bank was owed. To be able to buy that at a discount and negotiate it, it was like a game changer.

It was like, wow. Instead of trying to go buy houses and raise investment capital and buy them at a foreclosure auction to fix them up and flip them, which is heavy capital-intensive, it was like, Hey, we'll just buy the money and have no competition. There is very little competition in this process. There's very few people that know how to do it. Most people that I do know doing surplus proceeds in other states are still doing it the old way and taking a percentage. I've talked to their attorneys. I'm like, Just buy the claim. They're like, Well, how do we do that? It's not rocket science. If I can figure it out, you're If you're an attorney, you should be able to figure it out. But not all attorneys are created equal.

What would you say would be a good amount of profit that a beginner can see from doing their first deal? Let's say they wanted to partner up with you. Typically, what do you see on average?

It's all going to be dependent upon the size of the claim because you've got litigation costs. There's going to be additional trustees fees. The trustee tries to bill The case, $3,000 to $10,000 just for filing what they call a complaint for interpleeter. What an interpleeter means is it means we have no interest in the funds. We don't care who gets them, but they get to draft their little lawsuit, give them They're going to give money to the clerk or the Court, and then they get to take their fees for doing that. That's another little business model that the trustees have. I've seen some trustees sit on the money and not interplete it, and they'll bill against it through skip tracing and Hiring PIs and more legal review, legal review. They'll do that in some states till there's the three-year, what they call the S-cheat loss, where they have to turn over the money to the government if nobody claims it. They'll hold that in Trust. They'll hold out in their trust account and bill against it for three years, more revenue for the firm that way, until somebody claims it or they have to turn it over to the court.

Then if they have to turn it over to the court, they get to bill again for that. There's a little bit of a game now. In some states, I think it's South Carolina, if you don't make a claim to the money in 30 days, you lose it. It's lost.

Different states, different laws. Correct. Okay. Let's say if the beginner was to come to you, and once again, it's their first deal. Majority of Americans out there, they want at least an average, right?

They're going to make... Let's say the average claim. Let's say if we get $100,000 claim. Okay, fair enough. They're probably going to make 10 to 20 grand just working with me. Okay, cool.

So 10, 20 grand, guys, if the claim is about $100,000 working with Christopher Craig, I mean, there you guys have it. So we'll come back to this, man. This is a very interesting portion of your story. But I want to get into the entrepreneurship mindset. As you know, the Level Up podcast, the reason why I believe we became number one very fast is because we help people with their mindset. So it's all about mindset, right?

All about mindset.

All about mindset. So what What did you say made you want to be an entrepreneur?

I had really good jobs, but when the tech bubble hit in 2000, I didn't have a job. I was a worker that was a dime a dozen. In fact, there was no other job. I had to figure out something I could do. Thank God, I met, was introduced to my mentor, mentee, good friend today, Douglas McCabe. He gave me the trajectory, but he said, You got to put in the work. If you don't go knock the doors and you don't make the phone calls, you're not going to make any money. But the spark was the sky is the limit. Whatever I put into it, I'm going to get the direct proactive reaction out of it, which is dollars in my pocket. I was working seven days a week. I mean, you're young in your 20s, you can do that if you don't have a family. You got the energy. It's something new. You're learning. I I was constantly learning, but I was always reading books, new books on the craft itself, real estate foreclosures. I'm not telling everybody to go real estate and foreclosures today because it's a very fragmented market.

Unless they go with you.

Right. I've got 25 years of experience of all the tricks in the trade, from business bankruptcies on real estate to surplus proceeds A to Z. I've done it all.

You're also a professional with tax advising as well. Yeah. So you know your shit, dude. And that's why we're here. Because, guys, look, here's a story you guys don't hear. When we're at the charity event, you're explaining your concept to me, and I'm like, dude, you broke that down pretty simple, but I know it's not that simple. And you're like, it It was pretty simple. I was like, it's simple for you. But it's not simple for the majority of people watching this, right? The majority of people are still trying to figure out how they're going to make their bills every day, right? That's true. So with that being said, this is why we're here. We bring great guests like Chris who are experts in their in their niche, which is foreclosure in real estate and even taxes. Taxes. You're able to break it down in a simple formula, right? You wanted to go ahead and become an entrepreneur because you knew that the hard work that you put in, the energy that you had at At the time, you would get the reward. Correct. How does that make you feel? Did you feel good? Did you feel powerful?

Did you feel like, Dude, I can accomplish anything.

Think about this. Take a yard project, right? The honeydew list. Hey, I want you to build a waterfall or something. You go back to when you were a kid, anytime you built something on your own, after it was done, you felt really good about it because you accomplished it. That was the direct work you did with your own hands. Correct. Men were built to work. Absolutely. That's the bottom line. Even today, I might detract from doing paperwork and let's say, thinking from the neck above. I still get my hands dirty today. I've done general contracting. Hey, I was out there running I had heavy equipment yesterday at one of my house flips I'm doing in Henderson, Nevada. Well, it's not a house flip, it's a house rental, but I had to remodel it. I got one of those extend the lift, extreme lift things. I pulled the air conditioner off the damn roof by myself because I didn't have any guys to help me. They were 2 hours out, and I'm like, I got to get this done now. I just strapped it up, put it on the hook, and lifted it off, and moved it around, maneuvered it.

But I know how to operate heavy equipment.

And It's a perfect action, man. You're not going to wait for anybody. Get it done.

Right. Just go get it done. It's just like, HVAC guy calls, Hey, what am I doing? It's like, I'm paying you money to go out and figure the job out so I don't have to do it.

You're resource Resourceful, man. Not a lot of people are resourceful.

You have to leverage your relationships and your network. Call that your resources. The worst thing someone can tell you is no. Then move on to the next one. The next one. Somebody's I'm not going to say yes. It's a numbers game. It's no different than marketing and social media and digital marketing today. You got to go through 100,000 impressions to get 50 good qualified customers.

The growing pains, brother.

Right. Everything can relate, whether it doesn't matter the industry, it's still the same key concepts. But you got to have grit, you got to have the ability to adapt and overcome. You're going to get knocked down just like I've been knocked down. I've leveled up three, four steps and got knocked down five or six and had to start all over again. Not once, not twice, three or four times in my life, maybe five. But you cannot let... The mindset is believe in yourself because other people believe in you.

Chris, what would you say is your why now? I mean, obviously, when you were in your 20s, it seems like you were just a go getter, dude. You probably didn't even need a why. A lot of these youngsters nowadays don't need a why. They have the energy, they have the ambition, and they want to get paid, right? But right now, at your age, you've been an entrepreneur for more than 20 years now, dude. What is your why?

My why is, look, I've been through the Ringer, right? I've done it. I've failed. I've succeeded. But if I had that person, if I had somebody like me today, I could learn it all a lot faster instead of years, we could speed that process up into months, maybe even weeks, depending on how quick of a learner somebody is. But having that mentor relationship, we see a lot. 20 years ago, you just didn't see coaching programs.

Not at all.

Not at all. You would be afraid to ask somebody, Hey, could you mentor me? It just wasn't part of... The culture. The culture. It was, Go figure it out. Nobody's going to teach you. Now we have coaching, we have programs, people will teach you. It's more of my give back. But remember, I always say our networth is our network. If I can expand this and help other people put a few extra bucks in their pocket. It doesn't even have to be a full-time thing. It could be a part-time deal. If you could make an extra 5, 10, 15, $20,000 a month part-time, for some people, that might be all you need to do. It It's quality of life spending more time with your children, your family, doing the things you like to do. But I've always liked to do things that I find interesting and are new because I'm very classic is once I accomplish something, I've done this thing a few times, I got to find something more challenging.

Yeah, no, absolutely. You're a visionary guy then. I'm a visionary. I'm a visionary guy, man. You're the type of guy, okay? This is the type of guys that we are, guys. We're the type of guys that even though we might be super busy, we might have three, four things going on. We are the type of guys that would be like, let's go start another fire. Let's go ahead and start something else. Just because that's the way your mind is. That's the way that you have been at it for years. And I think I have a very similar background because you're a military on law enforcement, and I was very proactive. I was out there being very proactive as a cop. So that mentality from law enforcement of me always wanted to find work, me wanted to stay busy, me wanted to go ahead and earn it, I brought that mentality into entrepreneurship. I think for you, it's very similar.

When we go out and earn something, we feel good about earning it. Correct. When we go out and take something, we don't feel good about it. Correct. Right. Your mindset is feel good about earning your keep. Some people, I do a lot of coaching, and I'm very liberal with my time. People say, Okay, I need somebody to set up an LLC for me. I say, Why don't we just jump on a Zoom? It'll take 10 minutes, and I'll show you how to do it yourself. Some people are like, That would be great because it's going to save them 500 bucks of paying somebody else to do it. Absolutely. It's literally... Today, setting up your own business only takes about 15 minutes. But you have other companies, which is part of the game. They're part of the game. They're brokers. They're brokers. They're going to charge you a thousand bucks to do the same damn thing. I have clients that say, Chris, just set it up for us. We're happy to pay your fee. Are you sure about that? You don't want to do it yourself or at least... See, I'm the guy. I want to know how to do everything.

You're right, man. But see, the thing is, now in this day and age of social media, and ever since COVID, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like everybody has gotten almost We are trained to want instant gratification even more now. And it's because of these applications. Just think about it. We ordered some healthy food here in Miami, but we used an application to get it. We didn't have to physically drive to the location. We You don't have to physically order it anymore. No, everything's on the touch of your phone. Doordash. So it makes it... It almost reprograms your mind to want to go through what I like to call the path of least resistance. True. I think as a society, It's just going to get worse and worse and worse. And it's not to say it's a bad thing, because I think that's going to open a lot of more opportunities, right? For the entrepreneurs. Yeah, for the entrepreneurs, the people that are smart, the people that are thinkers, just like yourself and me. And for you guys are listening and watching to this. If you guys do take the opportunity. I had a guest yesterday.

He's a former PD, and he said, most people, they want to be entrepreneurs. But see, they're only putting in 5 % of energy to go ahead and do something that they want to accomplish. Now, imagine if you were to go ahead and triple that, you'd be at 15 %. Imagine if you gave 50 %. Imagine if you were at 100 %, how much shit you would get done on a daily basis, right? So I think for people that really want to go out there and achieve what they want, you guys have to go ahead and take a perfect action. I mean, you're hearing Chris's story. Chris came from the military. They didn't know much. A mentor, that's what I would consider. A mentor, yeah. The person that told you about it. Took me under his wing. The person took you under his wing, dude. And I had a ton of mentors. I just didn't call them mentors at the time. Right. I didn't know.

I didn't know. We wouldn't call him a coach or a mentor. No, we wouldn't. Without even understanding what the person was showing you. Exactly. He was showing you another... Doug McCabe showed me a different way how to... That's really where I became an entrepreneur was Okay, in this real estate, I was wholesaling. I was knocking pre-foreclosure doors, and I was buying people's houses at a discount, right? Yeah. If I'd get one locked up under contract, I would take my contract and assign it to McCabe, and he would pay me 10% of the profit. That's what he would pay me. Because I had no skin in the game other than my own two feet and door knockers, my fist, and that's it, and my mouth. That's what made me money. Sometimes I was making, even when I was like, $24, $25, $26, $20,000 a week back then.

Which is insane.

Right. And think about it. Now, it's much more difficult today because of the competitive environment we're in. We have There's five other people to that same door, but not so much in surplus proceeds.

The surplus proceeds, it's the new vehicle, essentially. It's the new window of opportunity right now in 2025 and beyond. All right, let's get back into the foreclosure surplus proceeds now. So your method that you're creating, I know you're coming out with this new community. It's a free general community where you're going to be teaching people on a weekly basis how to do this, right? Right.

We'll hold weekly Zooms.

Then you're also speaking at Swipe to Freedom, which is my event, guys. It's for one of my portfolio companies, CashWipe. As you guys know, we do credit card processing. Chris, for Craig, he's going to be speaking to over 400 entrepreneurs there, talking about surplus proceeds, which is going to be great. I know there's going to be a lot of people interested in that. And then another thing that you're doing is, essentially, you're doing almost like a done with you, done for you concept with the surplus proceeds, where you're going to help people find the actual auctions, where all they have to do is essentially just show up.

Show up to the auction.

Show up and be ready to make some deals and then to partner up with you. And then some people don't even need to have the money to go ahead and do that. They just need to go ahead and do the work and follow your advice, right?

We need somebody to go out and make contact so that we can make a deal with the homeowner. Homeowner makes money, you make money, I make. We all make money together. Man, that's amazing. And then we grow the network because collaboration is key. Instead of competition, why compete? Collaborate. Because we can grow faster and we can cover more ground and maybe reach more It drives, help more people.

What state, Chris, would you say right now is really thriving with this opportunity, with the surplus proceeds?

Let's see. I think certain parts of Texas, well, Las Vegas is That's the number one foreclosure spot in the US right now. I guess that depends on what news source we get. But Florida is getting hit pretty hard right now. What's happening in the foreclosure market or distressed property is during the pandemic, during COVID, where you saw the biggest run-up in housing prices, which was Florida, your red states, which didn't have restrictions, grew like crazy. Now there's a correction. But at the same time, I mean, look, Spirit Airlines just filed bankruptcy again yesterday. There's some economic factors as well. Interest rates are high. Some of these people that got COVID relief in their houses, they got a forbearance on the mortgage, which a forbearance says, Okay, you're behind 12 payments. We'll go ahead and we'll push them out four or five years, or we'll push them out three years, depending on what agreement they got with their lender or servicer. Well, now all these things are come and due. Now, people that got, let's say, adjustable rate mortgages a couple of years ago, where they got a low 3% introductory, then it went 4, then 5, then 6, then 7, they can't afford it at seven.

They could afford it at three, four, five, but not six and seven. You're seeing these types of properties foreclosed. Then you're always going to have divorce. You're always going to have alcohol, drugs, depression, and those other mental type factors. That's relevant always. But the economic impact right now, companies are closing, big businesses filing bankruptcy. What's this really looking like? We have job or wage stagflation. Your wages aren't going up when inflation is outpacing your wages. With those factors, foreclosures are up nationwide. There's a really good... It's a service, it's like 99 bucks a year, maybe 200 bucks a It's called ResiClub, R-E-S-I Club. Com. That gives us some of the best analytical data on the residential real estate market nationally. It will list out where all the top foreclosure cities are right now. Those are the cities. You just go pick 25 foreclosure cities. I team up with anybody listening here. If we had one or two people in each of these counties, these jurisdictions, we can cover a lot of ground with a lot of people. Now, let's say you go, Hey, man, I got If I want some extra money I want to invest.

Great. We pull our money together, we buy these claims together, we profit together. Wow, that's amazing.

That's amazing. Chris, where can they find you?

On Instagram, it's Christopher Craig, official. And on LinkedIn, it's the same thing.

Okay. And then you have a website?

We have a website called surpluswithchris. Com.

It's a nice, catchy name, dude. Yeah. Chris, what would you tell everyone right now that are interested in actually making money with foreclosure surplus proceeds. I feel like this is such a great opportunity. I'm even thinking of investing into this as well. But what would you say to the beginner entrepreneur right now, possibly people in the Possibly people in the military, possibly people in law enforcement, first responders that are looking to get into entrepreneurship. What are some words of advice that you would tell the audience right now, brother?

The very first step is getting your entity structure set up right. Going It's a business, that new LLC. Now, you don't necessarily need to have an LLC in the state you reside. You want a friendly LLC like Nevada, New Mexico, Texas. You want states that don't tax you on your profits. Florida is a good one. There's a lot of states, and I can help you walk you through. We can go on the Secretary of State's website, and literally, you can incorporate or organize your LLC in 10, 15 minutes. I I will coach you how to do that so you can save a few bucks. It's going to empower you to learn. Then it's property entity structure and tax structure. You might have your W, too. Well, you make extra money. It's getting taxed, too. But how do you minimize that? There's ways to do that. Now, as an enrolled agent, licensed to practice before the Internal Revenue Service. Plus, I have a Master's of Laws and Taxation. I have a couple of graduate degrees as well. I I call it tax efficiency. I will guide you and coach you. If you have children, for instance, simple things like paying your kids can reduce your taxes.

Not really the subject of what we're talking today, but when you work with me, you get all this knowledge built in 25 years and a lot of graduate education. I've got an MBA, a JD, and an LLM.

That's amazing, man.

That's four, two, and two. 8 years of graduate education.

I love that, brother. I love that. You guys will be teaming up with the best of the best when it comes to this industry, guys. Chris, anything else? Any words of motivation or anything else you want to leave with the audience?

It all comes down to action, guys. You have to be able to willing to take the step. I was about 40 pounds, just my own personal journey. About five months ago, I was like 280 pounds. Then actually, maybe even like May 31st, we went to Mexico. I take my kids, my wife. My wife's from Mexico. Her parents still live there. They're in their 80s, so they don't travel so well. We go for five weeks to Puerto Vallarta every year. I had a hard time doing 20 pushups. Now, I'm a Marine that usually could do knockout 50 pushups any given day, no matter how bad a shape I was in, I could always do knockout 50 pushups. It just might take me a few minutes to do it, right? Yeah. But when I struggled with 20 pushups and I had this fat belly, I was like, Okay, I got to take action. I was like, I got to be healthy for my family because I might stroke out or have a heart attack. I'm getting up there in that age where it's going to be common. So be willing to take action, be willing to learn, be willing to accept constructive criticism.

Oh, yeah.

I'm always willing. Look, what can somebody tell me that can help me make me better? Because we can't see it in ourselves half the time. We can't. We can't. People are a better judge of you than you are yourself. Just like we criticize, well, if you change this, change that. But it's just being willing to accept, take it in and build the thing that you want. But you got to start somewhere. It's baby. We crawl before we walk. That's right. Then once you get a little confidence, once you do a deal or or a transaction, you get a little bit more confident. Knowledge and education is power. Remember this, the more you learn, nobody can ever take that from you unless you get a head injury.

Absolutely, brother. I thought you were about to say, the more The more that you learn, the more that you earn. But I like what you said, too, Chris. Guys, that is the Level Up with Chris for Craig. He is a foreclosure, a surplus, proceed expert, guys, and tax advisor. So if you guys want to go ahead and actually contact Chris You could go to Chris for Craig, official on Instagram and surpluswithchris. Com, guys. This is Paul Alex with the Level Up podcast. Leave a five-star review on Spotify, Apple podcast, and on YouTube, guys. Because of you guys, the four million downloads a month, we are top four in all categories and number one in business currently. With that being said, we'll catch you on the next one. Thanks for listening up to the LevelUp podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to share with a family, friend, and everyone you know who's ready to LevelUp. Leave a five-star and wherever you tune in. It really helps spreading the word. And don't forget to check out officialpaulalex. Com for more episodes and resources to kickstart your journey. Let's LevelUp together.