Four certificates expired on me because I never diaried the deadline to start foreclosure

$10,550 on a book with $7,940 of face in the failed positions means your subsequents were roughly a third of face on the two you advanced on. That's a lot of capital going into positions you were, by your own account, not tracking.

The number I'd want from you: across the 42 that redeemed, what was the total interest received? If it's under $10,550 then the expiration didn't just cost you four positions, it wiped the program. I ask because a lot of people running this at 40 certificates find out the whole year's yield is one administrative failure wide.

@ledger is asking the right question. I'd add the diligence hours to it. 46 certificates screened properly is a lot of parcel cards.

On the fix, a calendar with alerts is the minimum and it will fail the same way the spreadsheet did, because the thing that failed wasn't the storage, it was that nobody was accountable for looking. I run reminders that require a written response on each open position at a set date. If I don't record a decision, the reminder repeats weekly and it gets loud. Sounds petty. It's the only reason I've never missed one.

So the strategy that's supposed to be passive fixed income needs per-position deadline tracking with escalating alerts. That's useful for me to know, I was reading this room as the low-effort option.

@kestrel the yield is fixed by statute, which is a different thing from the work being low. The interest rate doesn't require attention. The procedure does, and the procedure is where all the loss in this thread lives.

Two of the three counties describing the trigger differently on their own websites is the line I'll remember. That's not a you problem.

I'd push on what "begin the process" means, because in some states it's filing an application with the tax collector and in others it's filing a complaint in court, and the two have completely different lead times for getting a title search and a service list together. If yours is the court version, the real deadline is the one where you engage counsel, which is months before the statutory date.

So I'd add a third date to @thicket's two. Date you retain the attorney. That's the one that actually has to be met and it's the one nobody calendars.

The two vacant parcels are the part I'd grieve. Land at a tax certificate basis is the cheapest entry into a hold there is, and vacant land is also where certificates most often go unredeemed because nobody's living there to feel the pressure. Which means your unredeemed pile was systematically the pile you most wanted, and it was the pile you weren't watching. Worth flipping your screen around: if you'd been hunting land deliberately, those four would have been the front of the sheet.

Sorting by most recent activity is what did it, I'd bet. Anything with no activity for two years falls off the bottom of every list I've ever built. I sort my delinquency reports oldest activity first now for exactly this reason and the top of the page is always the ugly stuff.

Did the county notify you at all before the certificates expired, or does the statute put the whole burden on the holder?

The paper side of notes finally feels concrete to me after all the reading I've done. The certificate is an asset with an expiry date and the expiry isn't negotiable. That's closer to an option than to a loan in my head, which is probably wrong in some way but it's the first version I understand.

@vellum that framing works well enough for the deadline. The difference is that an option you let lapse cost you the premium, and @thicket also lost the subsequent taxes he kept paying into it, which is like paying to extend an option you'd already decided not to exercise. @thicket, the line about advancing subsequents on positions you had no intention of enforcing is the one I'm writing down. I've been assuming you always protect your position. You should only protect a position you want.