Since Sequoia's 56 slides of gloom and doom, a lot has been written on surviving the downturn.  Don Dodge has captured 11 items of advice from John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.  This focus on what you need to do to survive the downturn seems healthy to me because it assumes that you can and, with some grit and determination, will survive the downturn.  And, I think most start-ups will survive.  Having said that, some will experience a lot of pain and find themselves in dire straights.  And, yes, some will get into real trouble.  By real trouble, I mean bankruptcies and personal financial disasters.  To prevent these situations from becoming worse than they need to be, you need to understand where your personal liability begins and ends.  There has not been a lot of blog advice that I have seen on these points.  You can look at one thing I have written  Liability of Officers and Directors.  Item 6 of Doerr's list is "Renegotiate all contracts including rent. You will be surprised what can be renogitated for a lower price of better terms."  I agree with this item, but you need to be forward thinking about it.  Don't avoid the landlord or the bank -- deal with them up front in a realistic way.  For example, if you promised a payment on a day -- make it.  If you can't then communicate early so the lender is not surprised.  When dealing with creditors in these circumstances you need all the credibility you can get.  Also, raising and dealing with issues early (before the landlord has so many defaults that he gets panicked) will maximize the amount of flexibility that you get from the creditor.  By way of contrast, dodging phone calls and avoiding will just annoy the lender and may lead to inflexibility.