I've read a bit about asset protection. The big problem I see is that how do you trust advice/strategies from any given advisor/attorneys will actually hold up, rather than simply being an expensive piece of paperwork that gets disregarded right as it's needed. Perhaps I'd feel differently if say I were in one of the few states that explicitly respected self settled asset protection trusts. But as things stand I'm somewhat salty that say even a straightforward LLC seemingly can't be relied upon to protect from the liability exposure of owning a rental property, when done by an individual. Meanwhile corpos have successfully convinced courts to create post-facto liability shields between business units that hadn't even been structured that way ahead of time.

That in and of itself is not cheap.

Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. Insurance is not cheap. It exists to mitigate risk. But in most places the overall cost is probably less than $1000 per year for the protection of the sorts of values most of us are likely to acquire.