Ignorance was bliss. Now it's a pain in the ass.

I'm finding out that every day offers us an opportunity to find out how much we don't know. My wife and I have just been exposed to a situation that could turn out extremely well or extremely badly. Our landlords are going to be selling the house we are living in. Our choice is simple.

a) Move.
b) Buy the house.

Christine and I vastly prefer b). We hate renting, and have long wondered when we would get around to buying a house. Well, now it's time. And since we know so little about buying a house, we figured there'd be a lot of questions to ask. So the first thing we did was to compile a list of people we knew who were more knowledgable about real estate than we. That way, we could go down the list and ask them all our questions.

Of course, we hit a snag right off. As it turns out, we know so little about this subject, we don't even know what questions to ask.

This makes a phone conversation amusing:

"Hi, Dad? I need to know something about buying a house."
"Sure. What do you want to know?"
"Um...everything?"

So now I'm collecting terms I need to learn about. Mortgage brokers, interest rates, fixed-rates, FHA, HUD, county taxes, closing costs, and on, and on....and again, I can't even list all the stuff I need to learn about yet. I haven't learned what it is.

Some ancient sage said it. "The ignorant man does not know. The wise man knows what he does not know."

I think I'm somewhere in between.