The utilities it's what gets to you first. My parents used to be middle-class people in the late-1990s Eastern Europe until they both lost their jobs when the one big steel-factory in my home-town got closed down. In a matter of a just a couple of years they had to sell our family car and our city apartment (where we were all living), because utility bills have the nasty habit of coming in your mail-box even though you're out of a job. We only managed to got through all this because my parents still had a half-finished house in the countryside which has been their primary residence for more than 15 years now (and is still unfinished) while I got to go to college and managed to earn some financial assistance from my school for the first couple of years (and then found a job during school).

I know that the usual HN user comes from an Western country and has never had to deal with very big societal changes that can see political systems disappear over night, high-double-digit or triple-digit inflation or real-estate values collapsing to 5 or 10% of their initial value, but these will eventually happen in there, too.