We had just one question for the mortgage adviser. How much could we borrow?

It seemed simple enough, but he couldn't give us a straightforward answer.

"It depends on what you want," he said, before launching into explanations of capped rates, fixed rates, variable rates, redemption fees, tracker funds, low starts, high starts, start-wherever-you-like starts"

"Okay. So how much can we borrow?" my husband said again, while I tried to disguise my glazed expression.

The adviser shrugged. "If you find a property you really like, we'll try to find you someone who can lend you the money."

This house-buying business is making me nervous all over again. Although it's heartening to hear our tiny terraced cottage has doubled in value in the past three years, I dread the idea that we'll move up the ladder only to find ourselves sliding into negative equity. I've been there before.

Like many people who bought their first home at the end of the Eighties, I suffered years of watching my lovely flat plummet in value. I'd borrowed four times my salary to buy it and could barely meet the repayments. I certainly couldn't afford nice holidays or a car that worked.

Within four years, my home was worth £15,000 less than I'd paid for it. It took a total of nine years for the housing market to recover enough for me to move on.

Although the current predictions are that house prices will continue to rise, I'm, naturally cautious about my husband and me saddling ourselves with an enormous debt. Especially one that we don't fully understand.

"I don't think anyone really knows their mortgage," said a friend of mine when I aired my concerns over a coffee and the pages of Property News. "They think they do when the mortgage adviser is talking to them. But then they forget. I can't remember how mine works."

Another friend told me of a dispute she once had with her husband over the terms of their mortgage. He was convinced they had a capped-rate deal for the next 30 years. She recalled the capped rate would revert to the variable rate after four years. The only way to settle the argument in the end was for one of them to dig around in their loft to retrieve the original document. She, as it turned out, was right. He, understandably, was alarmed at how readily he jumped into a major financial commitment on the basis of a misunderstanding.

It's not really anyone's fault, though. The main problem with buying and selling property is that, unless we do it for a living, our expertise is pretty limited. If we make money out of our homes, it's not necessarily because we're good at predicting the twists and turns of the housing market. It's pure luck. Yet if we lose money on a property, we can easily feel as though we've been cheated out of what we thought would be a sound investment.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that we still haven't decided whether we want a no-frills mortgage deal, or one that remembers your birthday and picks up your dry-cleaning. I'm tempted by the latter.