[Schroedingersat]

The middle class is a myth. If you need your income or assets to survive and can't use it to feast on your neighbors during a crisis with the other vultures then you're a peon like the rest of us.

Just because you have to sell the jet ski and the SUV and might have to sell both houses because you over-leveraged trying to leech off of the rest of the working class doesn't mean you're being hurt more than the single mothers with two minimum wage jobs that are now homeless.

[AstralStorm]

There used to be a way, essentially limiting exposure of yourself to just media and maintenance. If you actually owned the necessary assets and were able to get a big buffer. Typically you got there by not overleveraging or using debt instruments at all.

These days it's getting ever harder to pull it off, if not impossible. Mostly because housing market jumped the shark.

Selling assets can be a problem anyway since many of them actually depreciate hard. Jet ski and old fuel guzzling SUV likely nobody will want. The house, maybe, but it will get ever harder to sell them as buyers are starved of money and credit.