With banks tightening their belts, more entrepreneurs with business plans are finding creative ways to secure funding for their start-up. Like raiding their retirement accounts. Some entrepreneurs have found that you can actually divert money from your 401K to your start-up without penalties or early withdrawal taxes. For this week's survey question, we asked whether any of you would be willing to tap into your nest egg to help fund your small business. Sure it's a risky move, but then isn't it equally risky to put your house on the line as many entrepreneur do to get a business loan? Maybe not. Says reader benpirie:

"While there is a lot of appeal in investing yourself, as well as leveraging a generally untapped source of funds, there could easily be some pretty awful consequences. Early withdrawal penalties in 401(k)s are there to offset the tax preferential treatment given to such accounts, but they also (intentionally or not) provide a barrier to fiscally irresponsible people blowing through their retirement savings in their younger years. While no one thinks their business is going to fail, many obviously do. If you've leveraged everything you own instead of just most of it, you're even further SOL."

Unfortunately, the response to our survey question this week was tepid. But, we're going to take the dearth of responses to mean that you guys were too busy wigging out about Wall Street (or watching the debates!) to answer. Nonetheless, who among you wants to take issues with benpirie's take? Wouldn't some of you agree that investing in yourself these days is a better bet than leaving your 401K to the whims of Wall Street?