From Zero to Millionaire: Master Tax Deed Investing with Joseph Griffin

Erika (00:02.999)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Erika, and today I’m pumped to sit down with Joseph Griffin, the mastermind behind Tax Deed Wolf Academy dot com and he is shaking up things in the real estate world with his tax deed investing strategies. Joseph, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (00:26.163)
It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Erika (00:29.399)
So our listeners here, they are going to love what you’re doing and just eat up all the strategies that you have to offer. It’s seriously impressive stuff. So we’re gonna dive into that. So for the folks who aren’t familiar with what you do in your world, can you give us the quick scoop on the main focus of Tax Deed Wolf Academy and how you’re tearing up the market?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (00:57.525)
100%. So Erica, they’re probably going to want to get their notebooks out and tell the kids to leave the room, tell their spouses, hey, take care of everything, get the pets out of the room. I really want to pay attention to this. So what happens is in the US, we have to pay property taxes. When property taxes are not paid, county or local municipality is going to come and they’re going to take that property and they’re going to sell it as some form of auction. Now, the opening bid is usually just what back taxes are owed.

Right. And so we come to these public auctions and we go ahead and we bid on these properties. Now we have been able to get properties. And when I say properties, I’m talking all types of real estate, land, houses, hotels, like anything can be sold at a public auction when property taxes are not paid. So we’ve been able to come and get houses for as little as $500 land parcels for as little as a hundred dollars. So

We come in and we’ve just been buying and we’ve been flipping. And long story short, I was able to use this strategy to retire from nursing when I was 29. So I kissed the hospital goodbye. said, hey, I’m focusing on real estate because this is gold. the rest was history.

Erika (02:09.493)
Wow, wow, that is really impressive. You know, it’s gotta be a lot juggling all those deals that you’ve made while also running your website and educating people. What’s been the key to deal with that volume and just juggling things?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (02:27.15)
So your first six figures you can do by yourself. When you want to scale and do like go on and on and on, you’re going to have to hire a team. All right. That’s been the biggest thing that I’ve done is created an awesome team. And one thing about building a team for anybody who’s new or thinking about getting a team is we have this misconception that we need to pay everyone hourly. So if you can’t afford hourly, you may want to bring in some.

for lack of better terms, like partners. So that’s how I started hiring. I started with my first assistant, but then as I bought on more and more people, I bought them on commission-based. Hey, this is what we have going on. If you can help me do X, Y, Z, you do the due diligence and then we’ll have the title company do this, right? You will get paid X amount of percent for every property that we close on. Okay. And that’s how was able to scale this business to where we are today. 30 something employees to this day, right?

So building a team is really what’s gonna help you out with that. And that’s what helped me out.

Erika (03:27.937)
That’s great. What advice would you give the people who are building a team? Like, what qualities would you look for?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (03:34.574)
One of the biggest things that I see people do is don’t try to change someone. I see where people want to bring in their spouse, they want to bring in their cousin or their sibling. Like, no, do this. It’s great, right? Yes, we’re going to make money. We’re going to buy houses. It’s great. Like, come do this, come do this. You cannot make someone do that, what they don’t want to do. All right, that’s going to be the biggest piece of advice I can give you. Don’t feel like you have to go to the people closest to you and try to change them.

If they don’t have that drive already, what’s going to happen is they may show you little glimpses of it, but then they’re going to ultimately hurt your business. So you can start simply by just putting out a post, right? Just literally put out a job offering. You can post this on your social media. You can get on platforms such as a hub staff. You can start out with virtual assistance, right? I started with virtual assistance paying as little as like $5 an hour to help me do certain tasks. And to be honest with you, don’t think that

like what you pay for is what you get. Like they will work harder than a lot of your coworkers that you’re working with on the state side. So, you know, start out with some virtual assistants if you have to and just ask, seriously, just get out there and ask and be willing to negotiate. All be willing to negotiate. If somebody wants a certain thing, maybe you can’t give them that certain dollar amount, but there may be some sort of bonus or incentive that you can give them when they hit certain numbers.

Erika (05:01.323)
Yeah, that’s really great advice. You’ve had a fair amount of experience with real estate. How many years has it been? Seven years. Awesome. So I’m sure in those seven years, you’ve had some curveballs. Would you mind sharing some real talk moments about a curveball and how you powered through?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (05:11.342)
About seven years now.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (05:24.67)
Yes. All right. So, yeah, we’re getting tax the properties for under $3,000. There’s a lot of curveballs, a ton of curveballs. We would be sitting here all day, Erica, if I I talked about all of them. So let me keep it kind of niche specific here with tax deeds. When you buy a property, when you get it, it’s sold as is right.

When I first jumped into the taxidiet space, I just thought I was just gonna buy properties, happy rainbows and unicorns. We’re all gonna just get rich. We’re very, very quick, right? That’s not what happened. The first property I bought, I didn’t really do my due diligence. Didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I was thankful enough to be able to sell it, but it had other liens on it. And I didn’t know about these other liens that could come with this property. So I was able to still find a buyer. He didn’t care about the liens. He just went ahead and covered it.

I negotiated the price down for him a little bit, but this is like, okay, this is something I need to look out for, liens, right? So then we just kind of add this to our blueprint. And another big issue that I see a lot of people dealing with is their team. And when I say team, property management, contractors. So I had this one contractor, I was doing a duplex, we’re doing a burr in New Orleans and I had this duplex. This contractor basically just kind of egged me on and egged me on. And I’m like, yeah, this project’s almost done.

So was like a long distance, cause I’m over here in Florida doing a flip and where I grew up in New Orleans. And you know, I paid this contractor and he just disappeared. He disappeared. Holy crap. Where did this contractor go? I’ve given him, you know, thousands of dollars. Where did he go? So that was a huge learning lesson, right? And now let me tell you how we, how we get over some of these, these obstacles now.

The lien thing, we just do our due diligence. We’re gonna run a title search or check public record and just make sure there’s no other liens on the property. Run a municipal lien search with the city. All right, cool, no liens. All right, this is the property that we’re gonna buy. The contractor thing, one thing that I’ve learned is everything has 100 % risk. Okay, military taught me this. We start out, especially in investing, we start out at 100 % risk. Our job is to do, every check mark that we can.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (07:39.426)
to reduce that risk as much as possible. Also understanding that we can never get to a zero. We can never get to 0 % risk. Everything is risky. You get out in your car and you go drive on the interstate, that’s risky for crying out loud, right? Even if you’re minding your own business. So what we’ve started doing, we started putting these check marks. When I pay a contractor, I will not pay a contractor cash and I will not pay a contractor Zelle. Why? I can’t get that money back, right? I cannot get that money back.

So, all right, let’s use business credit cards when we go pay our contractors. If they happen to run off, we can go ahead and call the credit card company and get our money back. Also the cool unique thing about that is we’re using the credit card, so we’re getting points on money that we were gonna spend anyway. So once the rehab is done, right, the lender’s reimbursing us all this, the rehab budget usually. So we pay off the cards, we’re getting all these points. The banks love us because we look like we have a crap ton of money.

And then we take a vacation after each flip using those same points. So it was like, okay, that was an amazing strategy that we developed to help out with.

Erika (08:49.055)
Wow, wow, I love that. Yeah, you really turned a difficult moment into basically a victory march.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (08:56.748)
Gotta learn, have to, true test of your character is how you deal with that versity, right? Some people give up, but when you get to this level where you really want this bad enough, you’re gonna just figure out a way.

Erika (09:00.917)
Yeah.

Erika (09:07.787)
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the next question I have, knowing with like all you’ve already like overcome, what’s the next big goal that you’re tackling to scale, whether it’s your portfolio or the Texty Wolf Academy?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (09:25.006)
So the next big goal that we’re focusing on is I honestly, is my calling. So my focus is to create more millionaires. I remember what it felt like to finally break down my personal financial statement and I’m like, holy crap, I’m a millionaire. Now keep in mind, you still want cashflow. You don’t wanna be one of these broke millionaires, just a crap ton of equity, but still no money to do anything.

So what I wanna do, I just wanna create millionaires the right way. I wanna show more people how we’re getting these properties for less than $3,000. Like there’s so many different aspects to tax sale. Are we gonna be investing in tax liens? Are we gonna be investing in tax deeds, redemption deeds, right? Depending on where we live, how are we gonna exit? Tax deeds is just an acquisition. That’s just one acquisition strategy. What’s an acquisition without an exit on how we’re actually gonna make money using that strategy?

Right? So some people want to come in, they want to wholesale real estate. They want to, they want to do it all. But either way, like at the walls of real estate, sorry, on, it’s on this side, right? At the walls of real estate, we’ve catered to pretty much every investing model. All right. So that’s our goal here. We want to just help as many people as possible. They just want to create millionaires. want to show, I want to show more people how to really play the game of monopoly, which, you know, doesn’t start till the bank hands out the money. Well,

As Americans, we’re taught something completely different. Let’s save, save, save, save, save. We will go so slow if we try to save our way to wealth. We need to get the money from the bank and then we need to invest. All right, so we wanna show more people how to do that so we can also ultimately just change our lives and live the lifestyles, live the lifestyle that we really wanna.

Erika (11:09.109)
love that you want to help other people in this way. from looking, like just hearing your story and looking at your website, like there’s got to be so many lives that you’ve changed, which is really awesome. So I wanted to ask you, a lot of our listeners here, they’re either new to real estate or if they aren’t, they are here because they want to level up. And you have

built something amazing and I know when we were talking earlier before the podcast that you’ve made some good connections out there yourself. What’s been the biggest driver for you in growing your network and building those key relationships?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (11:53.83)
So when I started out with taxing investing, I was telling you earlier, I started recording my journey. And so I’m posting like, oh, I got this property for $3,000. And everybody’s like, wow, what? And oh, it can’t be true. It can’t be true. So then I just continue to post and continue to post. Well, someone eventually reached out to me. I had this doctor that I worked with and he was like, wait, what are you doing? Because when you hear it, it’s like properties under 3000. It sounds crazy. But he’s like, he told me to come over to his house. He’s like, look,

Let’s talk. So what really opened up my mind is or what he was trying to explain to me is like, look at what you did when you only had, you know, $6,000. Imagine what you could do if you had $200,000. And I was like, wow, I’m gonna be honest with you, I was scared. I scared to like $200,000. Like what, what do you mean? So he’s like, man, like if we started, you know, let me give you to, let’s partner up and let me give you this money and we can scale expeditiously. And so that’s…

That was the biggest drugs like, wow, like there are people who want to invest money, right? They were people out there that just have too much money and they can’t invest it all. So starting a fund was something that, that ultimately that happened. started a fund and we went and we raised, you know, we raised a little bit of money. Well, with that money, we went ahead and we started, we started purchasing, you know, tax the properties. But what opened my eyes the most is that

you aren’t just gonna be some random person and just suddenly say, hey guys, I have a fun, give me money, right? So I had to network my butt off. I had to network my butt off. And that was something that I wish people would have really explained to me, the amount of networking you have to do in the beginning of your career. It’s, I’m going to an event like every other week. Every other week I’m going to an event.

Now, when you go to these events, you can’t just stand around in the back and look cute. You need to be actually shaking hands. You need to be talking to people, not just, hi, my name’s Joseph. Hi, I’m Erica. Nice to meet you. You know, we have to have a purpose for why we’re being there and understanding what exactly we’re looking for. When you’re talking to certain people, you may not, there may not be no type of partnership the first time you meet someone. And it’s important to still establish that connection and build that rapport.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (14:13.986)
because you never know what that person will become. And this is like really, this is huge. Not a lot of people teach this, but it’s huge. So if I met you Erica at some real estate networking event, you could just say, I’m brand new. I’m just here to meet people. Well, look, I’m gonna make sure I get your info. We’re gonna follow each other on social media. It could be five years from now that you, let’s just say you got married and your husband is this huge real estate developer. And now you’re helping him out.

You see what I mean? So it’s super important that like just go Understand what type of people you’re trying to meet and actually build a connection and foster that like build rapport Don’t just meet people just cousin you get these business cards and then you throw them all in the trash Right. crap. What happened to that person? I met two years ago at least get their social media Instagram really helped me blow up at least get their social media follow each other. Keep track You never know when when when something’s gonna come around for you both to partner up

Erika (15:13.173)
Yeah, yeah, that’s really helpful. yeah, just knowing how you started, really goes to show that relationships are the backbone of the business. Yeah.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (15:25.43)
yeah. yeah. And banking relationships too. I said it earlier, the game of Monopoly doesn’t start till the bank hands out the money. And so people don’t have any sense of urgency to go to banks and just meet people in the banks. The banks are the ones that are ultimately going to give you the money for most of your deal. So it’s something that’s really overlooked building relationships with those banks.

Erika (15:46.955)
Yeah. That’s really interesting, actually. Can you expand on that a bit more? Because that’s something that we don’t hear around here too often.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (15:56.364)
Yeah, so people think of banks as like these big bad wolves, right? No pun intended. They think of banks as like the big bad wolves, but in all reality, the bank’s scope is to buy and sell money, right? That’s literally what they’re here to do. If the banks could go buy up real estate, they would buy everything and we’d be screwed. We wouldn’t own anything. The banks would just own everything. When you go get a mortgage, whose name goes on a deed? It’s still your name. The bank just sold you the money, right?

So the banks, we need to start looking to the banks as partners, right? They have to give you the money. They have a certain amount of money to give and they need to give it or they’re not making any money because they are gonna get paid via the interest on the money that they give out. Without interest, inflation is so high that without interest, we fail, right? I mean, as an economy, if really, if people are, if the banks are not making interest, no one’s making any money.

All right, so I use the monopoly example all the time or analogy. Some of us need to just go back and play a monopoly. You’re not buying any houses until the bank passes out the money. Imagine playing monopoly and not getting any money from the bank and you have to roll the dice and pass go as much times as possible to finally have enough money to buy any real estate. Right, that would be crazy. So why do we do it? Why do we do it in America?

Right. So that bank partnership is step one. There are three pillars that I normally teach. The first one is credit, right? Credit. So I don’t like credit, but it’s just a game and we have to play it. So first one’s credit. The second thing is business. That’s structure. That’s funding. You want to be structured to a point where you’re not paying a crap ton in taxes, right? With depending on what your game plan is. And you need to be structured to a point where you’re not increasing your liability. Once you have those two things, then we finally get into investing.

Investing is literally the last thing. So those are the three things that pretty much every investor needs. Now, throughout that, there’s other things like networking and this and this and that that we incorporate into there. But those three things are the basic baseline pillars of becoming an investor.

Erika (18:12.951)
Thank you for sharing that. I feel like that is going to be so helpful for everyone listening today, Joseph. I really appreciate that.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (18:22.446)
Anytime this is like I said, this is what I’m here to do is teach in the army I was an educator and in nursing I was an educator So when I came they say how you do anything is how you do everything, right? So it was only right that when I jumped into real estate, I would eventually become an educator

Erika (18:42.465)
Joseph, thank you so much for your service in the Army. And before we wrap up, I wanted to ask if someone is fired up about all the information you’ve shared, or they want to collaborate with you, maybe learn more about tax de-investing, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (19:03.726)
Best way is gonna be on all social media platforms Simply Google tax deed wolf, but we’re on Instagram taxi will CEO YouTube channel tax deed wolf Like I said, if you just Google tax deed wolf or tax the wolf Academy taxi wolf Academy comm you will find us We’re pretty much we’re pretty much everywhere. We actually just got an award top top tax the course in Florida 2025. Yeah, we made the

cover of my deltona magazine so we’re pretty out there. We have clients and not just the US, clients all over the world. I got clients in Dubai, the UK, Canada, so this isn’t limited like for just US citizens as long as you have a little bit of money or a little bit of drive. You don’t even have to have the money. If you have the drive and you just are seeking the knowledge to do better, hey, we want you in the community.

All right, our main goal is to take as many people as possible to that next level so we can do bigger things, right? We want to, when we’re buying apartment complexes, understand that it’s not just one person. When someone buys a sports team, it’s not just one person. It’s a bunch of people, they syndicate and they come together and they do these big things. So that’s the reason why we’re here, to help you get to the next level. So eventually we will all be partners.

Erika (20:27.381)
I love that. Perfect, Joseph. Thanks so much for dropping all that value on our podcast today. Your hustle and mission is really inspiring.

Joseph Griffin Tax Deed Wolf (20:39.628)
No, I appreciate you for having me. So I’m ready to give the tax deed knowledge whenever your audience wants to. There’s a lot to it, but it’s simple steps. All simple steps. Anyone can be in their next auction in probably under 30 days and be getting a property for less than $5,000.

Erika (20:57.693)
To everyone listening, if this episode lit a fire in you, make sure that you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more powerhouses like Joseph Griffin lined up and they’re gonna share real strategies with how to thrive in real estate. We’ll see you on the next one.