I thought a note meant a note, like something written on paper

Two weeks into all of this and I sat down at a coffee thing where four people were talking about buying notes. I assumed they meant something like a letter of intent. Some kind of written offer.

Took me most of an hour to work out they meant the actual loan. The IOU. The thing that says I promise to pay this amount at this rate. And you can buy it off whoever holds it, and then the payments come to you instead of them.

Nobody explained it to me. I just kept listening and it assembled itself. At one point a woman said "I own the debt, not the house," and that was the sentence that flipped it.

Everything's new right now. But that one I'll remember because I was so far off.