By Robbie Vorhaus

There's an old saying about debt: When you borrow $100,000, it's your problem, but when you borrow $1 million, it's their problem.

Which brings me to the use of a particular type of debt to which entrepreneurs, myself included, have turned to launch their companies: credit cards. In my case, three years into the founding of my Manhattan-based public relations agency, Vorhaus Communications, I found myself $125,000 in debt, $65,000 of which was on credit cards.

So it was my problem then, and because I wouldn't ever get to the $1 million, it would always be my problem -- as it will be for company founders who do the same. Plastic is helpful, sure, albeit expensive, even more so a decade and a half ago than now.

Back then, interest rates were topping 18 percent and the cards came with annual fees, even though, unlike today, you could float your money for six weeks. Today's fast computers have put an end to that. However, what I remember most of all about the debt in those years is that it was terrifying.

A PERFECT STORM.  It was terrifying to be personally on the line for so much money -- half of that $125,000 was credit-card debt, and the balance represented loans from family and friends and bank overdrafts. So terrifying that I even acutely recall my contrasting emotion when I finally began paying it back in 1993, after my business had turned the corner.

Paying it back in huge chunks, as much as $8,000 a month, I felt as happy as hearing the song birds sing at dawn, or watching a rainbow after a long, slow rain. It just felt good.

Which brings me to the point of this article: more than anything, because I have been there and done that, I want to help other entrepreneurs who are just heading down that route. If I can convince just one founder to use plastic judiciously, I will have been of service.

In the fall of 1989, when I left CBS TV, after also working at CBS News, I found myself in a new company -- my own -- and a new industry, public relations. I was launching my business just as a major recession was taking hold. I was 37 years old, newly married, and beginning my trek into heavy debt.

It was, looking back, truly the gathering of the perfect storm. Because I was in a new industry, I had limited relationships. (My relationships were in the media, not with corporate communications heads.) I had limited capital (always my problem), and the 1991 recession had begun. I hadn't realized how bad I had slipped until, after working for 20 successful years in journalism, I had to go out and get my New York taxicab license, just to keep cash coming in.

THE LOWDOWN ON PLASTIC.  The irony is that when it comes to plastic, even doing it right can turn out wrong. I had worked at CBS TV until the very last day, whereas perhaps I should have been leveraging contacts to lay the foundation for my own business. I should have been getting a handle on the nuts and bolts, such as ordering stationery.

Instead, with a severance package, I found myself suddenly without a paycheck and with a company. To conserve cash, I began in the living room of my apartment, not moving to rented office space for two years. I lined up contracts from my former employer -- contacts that got, and kept, the ball rolling for about a year. Partly because my building's coop board forbade it, I couldn't touch the equity in my apartment.

In sum, break down that $125,000 over the two years in which I had taken it out -- a six-month stretch in 1990 and 1991, when the CBS contract work had ended and absolutely no work came in, and another 18 months thereafter,when there was only a trickle -- and that's hardly extravagant spending.

Divide the $125,000 by 24 months, understand that I had to pay for postage, travel, and entertainment to secure clients, and also for my living expenses in Manhattan, and that's $5,200 a month-- indeed, downright frugal.

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