Our story · 5 min read · By Jeremiah Cox, Co-Founder

Why we started Straightforward Claims Recovery

The whole thing started with a man named Ray, and a number that didn't add up.

Back then I worked in insurance. Most of my days were spent on the phone with people on the worst week of their lives, a fire, a death, a house they were about to lose, going line by line through paperwork nobody ever wants to read. I was good at it because I'm the kind of person who can't leave a number alone until it makes sense. That habit is the only reason any of this exists.

Ray was in his seventies, out near Dayton. He'd lost his house to foreclosure a couple of years earlier and had moved into a rented room. We were sorting out something unrelated when I pulled his file and saw what the house had actually sold for at the sheriff's sale. It went for about forty thousand dollars more than he'd owed on it. I remember reading it twice, thinking I'd misunderstood.

So I asked him, carefully, what happened to the extra money. And he had no idea what I was talking about. No one had ever mentioned it. As far as Ray knew, the bank took the house and that was the end of the story.

The part nobody had told him

It wasn't the end of the story. Under Ohio law, when a home sells for more than the debt against it, that surplus belongs to the former owner, or to their heirs. Not the bank. Not the county. Ray's money had been sitting at the courthouse the entire time, in his name, waiting for someone who never came to collect it.

The reason he didn't know is almost stupid in how simple it is. The notice about the surplus gets mailed to the last address on file, which is the house you just lost. It arrives at a home you no longer live in, gets returned, and nobody follows up. Then a clock starts. If no one claims the money in time, the state or the county keeps it for good.

I went home that night and couldn't let it go. I started pulling public sale records on my own time, just to see if Ray was a fluke. He wasn't. Case after case, the same shape: a family loses a home, the home sells for more than they owed, and the difference quietly evaporates into government coffers because the one letter that could have changed things bounced. Tens of thousands of dollars at a time. Real people, most of them older, a lot of them grieving.

This wasn't a loophole or a gray area. The money was theirs. The system that held it just wasn't built to find them.

So we built the thing that should have existed

I'm not a lawyer, and getting this money back is a legal process at its core, so I couldn't do it alone and I didn't try. I found a couple of co-founders who saw the same problem I did, and together we started building the two halves of an answer.

The first half is legal. We pulled together a network of local attorneys who actually know these county courts, the ones who can file the distribution motions, untangle competing liens, and prove heirship through an estate. That's the hard part, the part that stops most people cold when they try it on their own.

The second half is human. We built a team whose entire job is to find the families in the first place, the Rays who have no idea, and then stay with them through a process that can drag on for months. Our customer success folks are the ones who pick up the phone, explain what's happening in plain English, and chase the paperwork so you don't have to.

What we're actually trying to do

The ambition isn't modest, even if the work is unglamorous. We want every Ohioan who's genuinely owed surplus funds, and has a legitimate claim, to actually receive them. Not just the ones who happen to open the right piece of mail, or have a lawyer in the family, or can stomach a county court process alone. All of them.

That means we say no sometimes. If we look and there's nothing there, or the claim isn't clean, we tell you straight. We'd rather lose the work than walk someone down a road that leads nowhere. And it's why we built the whole company around one rule we won't bend on: you can verify everything yourself. The records are public. We'll point you right to them.

I don't know if Ray ever pictured someone building a company around his forty thousand dollars. But if you lost a home in Ohio and there's a chance money was left behind, that's exactly what we're here for. It costs nothing to find out.

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