Lose your job, hit the road

Well, apparently there can be one upside to losing your job in this cratering economy – providing, of course, that you have sufficient savings to fall back on. You can travel. That is exactly what some out of work financial workers are doing these days. They’re lucky, of course, in that they’re more likely to have financial means squirreled away than the average teacher or assembly line worker who finds him or herself among the unemployed. Nevertheless, this Washington Post story caught up with some recently unemployed financiers who, upon realizing there was no current job market for their skills, decided to hit the road.

When Deutsche Bank determined that strategist Rod Manalo was, in the merciless language of hard times, “redundant,” it was an abrupt and humbling end to a seven-year career in finance.

But Manalo, 30, has not been trudging the gray streets of London where he was based looking for work. This week, he was in the sun-drenched Brazilian resort city of Florianopolis, taking surfing lessons and dancing in throbbing nightclubs amid Carnival revelers. That was after he had snowboarded in the Alps, golfed in Florida and prepared for a year-long world journey that he expects will take him to the Amazon, Antarctica, Australia and beyond.

“Decent finance jobs are nonexistent. Few hedge funds and no investment banks are hiring. If I were to find a job, I’d just fear losing it again, would continue to watch markets drop and would expect little or no bonus,” said Manalo, who was fired in December from his position as a vice president in risk arbitrage. Apart from occasionally watching his investments, he said, “I am fully focused on traveling.”

One byproduct of the economic blood bath of the past several months has been a bumper crop of relatively young and wealthy but out-of-work financiers. Unemployment in the financial sector in the United States doubled from 285,000 in January 2008 to 571,000 last month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are “pink-slip parties” in New York for the newly untethered to mingle and match. Business school applications have soared for those seeking academic shelter.

But some financial refugees have fanned out around the globe in pursuit of leisure, achievement or to explore something, anything, outside a cubicle’s confines. And if a dozen or so lost souls of finance are any indication, many are finding at least a temporary refuge roaming the globe.

Related posts:

1. Lost Girls on the road ...
2. Re-thinking Islamic banking ...
3. Creating time to travel ...