If your business goes banckrupt, you won'y lose your house, car etc. A LLC is an individual entity. It has all the rights of a person.
You will still have to pay income taxes no matter if you have a DBA or not, depending on if you reach the minimum threshold or not. The DBA just establishes your business name. As an example, if you are marketing your business as "Jim's Superstore", you will need a DBA. If you are marketing yourself as "Jim", you don't need a DBA. So if you are advertising "mysite.com", you should get a DBA. If you are marketing "myname.com", you don't need a DBA. You will still have to file a Schedule C for your self-employment earnings.
http://answers.uslegal.com/?auslf=pd-LLCDP has a list of questions/answers on it by lawyers, and they also have the forms available for a few bucks (http://www.uslegalforms.com/corporatecenter/llc-formation.htm?auslf=pd-LLCDP)
I will once we reach the $5,450. My tax friend said we don't need to register yet and he's been doing this for awhile so I'm sticking with what he says. This business is not really "high risk", we can't go bankrupt, I'm not sure it's even possible.