April 27 (Bloomberg) -- In early 2008, David Roberts’s morning routine at the Ridgewood, New Jersey, train station was as unchanged as the view from its platform, which overlooks a downtown anchored by the Daily Treat diner and a 77-year-old movie theater. Roberts would sip coffee, eat a corn muffin, scan the Financial Times and step aboard the 7:50 train.

This was not the same trip he had made for the 14 years he worked for three Wall Street firms. This was a commute to nowhere.

Roberts, 61, was bound for an outplacement center on New York’s East 37th Street, where he pursued job leads and the dream of starting a consulting firm with former colleagues. Like many of his neighbors in Ridgewood, Roberts had been thrown out of work after the credit markets seized up last year, joining thousands of commuters in the competition for jobs that don’t exist anymore.

Roberts, an economist at Dominion Bond Rating Service until January 2008, was fired 13 months after he predicted in a published report the recession that would end his livelihood.

“You can see a train wreck coming,” Roberts says. “But that doesn’t mean you can get out of the way.”

Roberts has suffered through a chain of unanswered job applications, an ill-fated relocation to Washington, and depression. As of April, he had lost or spent more than half of his $1.4 million in savings. One of the few risks he takes with money these days is at the poker table.

26,000 Jobs Lost

Roberts and his wife -- who is battling multiple sclerosis -- are moving to Vermont, where they honeymooned and often vacation. He has grown a gray-and-white beard more befitting the Green Mountains than Wall Street.

Knowing that the money he has left won’t last forever, Roberts must figure out a new way to earn a living. “I don’t know where the income is going to come from,” he says.

Roberts is one of 26,000 people who lost financial services jobs in New York City from January 2008 to March 2009, according to Moody’s Economy.com. Many live in bedroom communities such as Ridgewood -- a Bergen County enclave of 24,300 people 25 miles from Wall Street.

Ridgewood retailers say some stores’ Christmas receipts were off 40 percent last year. As many as 30 stores and restaurants in the business district are for sale. The village government trimmed three building inspectors after a two-year, 46 percent drop in construction activity.

Ramapo Retreat

Nestled in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains, Ridgewood has had a symbiotic relationship with New York’s financial district since the mid-1800s, when tycoons built summer homes there. Commuter trains soon carried dad to the financial jungle while mom stayed home and raised the kids. “It’s for domesticated masters of the universe, a throwback to the 1950s,” says Erik Sorenson, chief executive officer of online career firm Vault.com and a Ridgewood resident.

Ridgewood’s projected median household income for 2009 is $129,394, according to market research firm Nielsen Claritas, which makes it the 17th-most-affluent U.S. community in the 20,000 to 50,000 population range. From 1991 to 2006, the average home sale price more than tripled to $864,000, according to the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service.

Now that market has reversed. Ridgewood averaged 11.3 home sales a month in the first quarter of 2009, versus 32 in the first quarter of 2007, a 65 percent drop, according to Otteau Valuation Group Inc., a real estate analysis and consulting firm in East Brunswick, NJ.

End of the Good Life

The good life for Roberts and many others who live in and around Ridgewood has given way to a need for personal and professional reinvention. The Bergen County chapter of the Financial Executives Networking Group, which meets twice a month in Ridgewood and neighboring Paramus, has grown to more than 2,000 members from 20 when it was founded in 2002.

Roberts says he and his neighbors who worked on Wall Street “do not understand: You lose your bonus, you lose your job, and you have no prospects.”

Roberts never earned millions from Wall Street. In his best years, he made $500,000, which provided scant cushion against prolonged unemployment or career upheaval. His salary is more representative than those of the chief executive officers and hedge fund managers who have been pilloried in congressional hearings.

Not everyone is giving up. Matthew Tuck, a 37-year-old U.K. native, who drives to Ridgewood from a nearby town for meetings of the networking group, spent 14 years making commercial loans for London-based Barclays Plc and Lloyds TSB before Lloyds let him go last September.

Fruitless Job Hunt

Unable to land even an entry-level bank position, he applied to the business development department at a law firm offering half of his old salary. “It’s sale time,” he recalls telling the interviewer. He didn’t get the job.

Success for Ridgewood’s newly unemployed is rare. Bradley Browne made $150,000 as a Standard & Poor’s analyst until May 2008; now he teaches freshman finance at DeVry University in Paramus for $2,000 a course. Chuck Fischer, who lost his customer relations job at RBC Capital Markets in April 2008, considered taking a sales position at Home Depot -- one requiring an orange apron. He decided against it.

Richard Wloczewski, the U.S. Postal Service mailman in Roberts’s part of town for the past quarter century, guesses at least six husbands on his route are unemployed. He sees cars that used to be at the train station in the driveway and dads walking their kids to school instead of moms.

As for Roberts, “When he grew the mountain man beard, I kind of had a little suspicion,” Wloczewski says.

‘I Screwed Up’

The job seekers have all suffered psychological blows at least equal to the financial ones. “Guys are feeling like, ‘I screwed up,’” says Russ Borgman, who runs a support group called Men in Transition at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Ridgewood. “You got out of school, you worked hard, you went to work on Wall Street. And stuff happens to you.”

After Roberts lost his job, he and his wife, Deborah Turner, 62, for the most part stopped attending West Side Presbyterian Church, where they have been members for 20 years. He says he is chagrined at his reduced circumstances and the offers of comfort he gets from fellow churchgoers.

“Inside, it’s very, very hard for me to accept there’s anything other than shame here,” he says.

The couple has also withdrawn economically. Dave and Deborah say they have dined out just three times in the past year. Their main entertainment is watching movies from Netflix, the mail-order film rental company. Roberts no longer plays at the Valley Brook Golf Club in River Vale, New Jersey. He hasn’t fixed the broken radio in his 1994 Jaguar.

Career Workshops

The economist gets his books -- of late, biographies of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt -- from the Ridgewood Public Library, which saw an 80 percent spike in attendance for its adult programs from February 2008 to February 2009, including career workshops. In the reading room, Roberts finds himself among other middle-aged men he suspects are also unemployed.

“We pretend we’re taking a break from work,” he says.

The library is surrounded by young trees planted in memory of the 12 Ridgewood residents who died in the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “From an emotional standpoint, it’s probably the equivalent of 9/11,” says Bob Hutton, a Ridgewood school board member. “It’s different emotions, but on the stress scale, they are comparable.”

Sept. 11 brought Ridgewood’s citizens together. The economic collapse mostly plays out in individual isolation. “People vanish,” says Oliver Abel, owner of Oliver’s Chocolates, a downtown shop. “You just don’t see them; you don’t see their wives.”

Worked with Volcker

David Roberts isn’t a household name, yet he’s worked with some who are. In the 1980s, he participated in an economic study with Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who’s now an adviser to President Barack Obama. He also shared a panel with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in 2001 when Geithner was at the International Monetary Fund.

Roberts and Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and a New York Times columnist, were both on a committee that advised Bill Bradley on his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000.

Roberts’s career arc tracks Wall Street’s over three decades. After earning an economics degree from Rice University in 1969, he enrolled in the Houston school’s Ph.D. economics program, becoming Dr. Roberts in 1976. His thesis was on income distribution and savings rates in Colombia. He spent several weeks in that country researching its social structure.

Brooklyn to Ridgewood

In 1979, Roberts became an economist at the New York Fed, where he analyzed the risks to U.S. banks of lending overseas. In 1990, Roberts, by then the father of a young daughter and with a son on the way, moved from an apartment in Brooklyn Heights in New York to Ridgewood, where he bought a house with a $244,000 mortgage.

In 1994, midway through an 18-year bull market, he jumped to Duff & Phelps Credit Rating Co., raising his pay 50 percent, to $150,000.

Dave and Deborah loved Ridgewood from the start. Deborah’s flower beds earned “garden of the month” honors from the local horticulture club. She also led a women’s book club for several years. The club members’ husbands started a monthly poker game.

Million-Mile Member

Roberts traveled constantly for Duff & Phelps -- so much that after less than three years he was a member of American Airlines’ million-mile club. Being away from home became harder after 1994, when Deborah was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a progressive neurological disorder. It caused pain, numbness and tingling in her legs and impeded concentration. Dave’s absences brought tensions and tears. Yet he felt he had no choice.

“I felt like a guy who was producing for his family,” he says. “It meant I gave less weight to seeing my family.”

Roberts’s hard work begat real affluence in 1997, when Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. hired him as an international economist, guaranteeing him $500,000 a year in salary and bonus for his first two years on the job. The new position allowed him to buy that Jaguar and remodel his kitchen for $98,000. It also locked him into a lifestyle that depended on a robust salary.

“There was a downside risk to all this pay,” he says.

In 2004, after Bank of America scaled back its emerging- markets exposure, it no longer needed international economist Dave Roberts. He would be 18 months between jobs. He spent his days at an outplacement center in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, scouring employment sites on the Internet. Sixty applications yielded five interviews, no job offers and depression.

Outplacement

On bad days, “I’d go to the outplacement center, but I wouldn’t go in,” he says. “I’d sit in the car and just listen to NPR or take a nap.”

Deborah’s MS precluded her returning to the copy-editing work she had once done. She struggled to find a pharmaceutical cocktail that would control her disease.

Roberts finally talked his way into a job with Toronto’s closely held Dominion Bond Rating. It was opening a New York office to take its business international. Roberts was both an economist and a rainmaker for Dominion, tapping government contacts from Mexico to India to build the firm’s reputation and revenue.

“David was very good at relating to sovereign issuers individually,” says Fergus McCormick, who headed the team that rated foreign government debt. “He brought a real weight to the room.”

From his desk at Dominion, Roberts saw a recession coming - - though not the financial catastrophe that has engulfed the world. In late 2006, yields on 3-month Treasury bills were running higher than those on 10-year U.S. bonds, creating an inverted yield curve -- in which short-term debt offers a higher yield than long term.

Yield Curve Insight

As he saw it, the Fed’s effort to fight inflation by raising short-term interest rates could stunt economic growth.

“The inversion of the U.S. yield curve signals a significant risk that the U.S. economy will fall into recession over the next 12 months,” he wrote in his Nov. 29, 2006, report.

His assessment was on the mark. The recession began in December 2007, even though it wasn’t certified as one until a year later. The economist lost his job in January 2008, when Dominion cut back along with the rest of the financial industry.

At his new outplacement office on 37th Street, Roberts soon became discouraged. No matter how many calls he made or how he tweaked his resume, an economist was costly window dressing for a Wall Street that was boarding up its windows for a storm. For a month, Roberts rode the 7:50 train each morning. Then he started making the trip just four days a week; by April 2008, it was one day a week.

Musical Chairs

“I felt like I was playing a game of musical chairs where someone’s taken out half the chairs,” he says.

That month, Yusuke Horiguchi, an old Rice friend, called from the Institute of International Finance, a research and lobbying firm for global banks in Washington, to offer Roberts a temporary position as an economist. Roberts jumped. His Dominion severance payments were nearly up, and his son, Mickey, had been accepted at Vermont’s Bennington College, where tuition and other costs add up to about $50,000 a year.

The IIF job was for three months, Roberts was told, and he hoped it would be made permanent.

On May 6, he started work; the paycheck matched Dominion’s, without the annual bonus. Choosing to believe the job would last, Roberts signed a three-year lease on an Acura TL for $550 a month and rented an apartment in suburban Rockville, Maryland, from which he commuted home to New Jersey on weekends.

Interim Job Ends

On Aug. 5, Roberts was told the interim job would end in September. He went back to his apartment, climbed into bed --and into a deep funk. For three days, he got up only to go to the bathroom.

“I couldn’t think of a way out of this,” Roberts recalls. “I didn’t have any ideas, and I didn’t know how to tell Deborah, ‘My skills aren’t going to be saleable for a long time.’”

When Deborah arrived for a visit, she spoke the words that would take them in a new and unpredictable direction. “Let’s stop hitting our heads against the wall,” she told him. “Let’s sell the house and move to Vermont.”

Roberts hasn’t interviewed, or shaved, since.

Taking a Cut

Former Lloyds banker Matthew Tuck is still shaving--and still looking for work in banking. Since he was let go in September, he has applied for more than a dozen jobs and is a regular member of the Financial Executives Networking Group. He was one of 400 applicants for a post at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. It paid about $85,000, half his Lloyds base salary and two-thirds of his pay when he arrived in New York in 1995 with Barclays.

In 1997, while at Barclays, Tuck met Brooklyn-born Maria Priolo at the Greatest Bar on Earth, on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower. She was a Salomon Smith Barney assistant sales associate. It was a romantic start -- the Brit and his Brooklyn bride with their opposites-attract accents --in an age when double-income Wall Street couples had it made.

They married in 2000 and moved to a stone house in West Caldwell, New Jersey, built in 1915, where both an American flag and a Union Jack fly out front. They had two children, now 6 and 7 years old, and Maria stopped working.

Now both the Greatest Bar on Earth and the golden era of Wall Street are gone. The lifestyle based on Matthew’s income -- the Land Rover, the dinners out, the Bermuda vacations -- is a memory. Tuck’s $406 a week in unemployment benefits covers the $13,000 a year in property taxes on his house and not much more.

‘I’ll Be Ignorant’

Tuck got neither the comptroller job nor one he sought at a local HSBC branch, where he couldn’t even get an interview. He suspects his resume scares insecure bank managers. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ll be ignorant if you like; I’ll act really dumb if you want me,’” he says.

Tuck sensed hard times were ahead in 2007. He had socked away $90,000 by the time his number came up. As of April, he had gone through half the money and was trying to economize to preserve the rest. During the winter, he heated only high-use rooms. He gave up his mobile phone and switched his long- distance service to Vonage, the Internet phone service. No more maid; no more vacations.

Now that Maria’s cooking more, she’s sorry they never replaced the balky old Magic Chef stove or upgraded the kitchen. “I just think, ‘Wow. We could have had this; we could have had that,’” she says. “That’s what you fight about; you fight about finances.”

Money Conflicts

Conflicts over money are exacerbated when the Tucks see that neighbors still have plenty of it. “Everyone’s still updating and redoing their kitchens; they’re still going on vacations,” Maria says.

“I hear about it when she comes home,” her husband says.

“Oh, stop it,” Maria says.

Matthew, with Maria in the room, says his wife is reluctant to go back to work, perhaps because her working would be a sign the Tucks had slipped in the social ranking. “It’s difficult,” Matthew says. “We have to make ends meet. I’d rather you go to work than see our house for sale.”

Maria says she’ll look for work once both kids are in school full time next fall. “I would love to go back to doing what I did and getting paid what I was getting paid,” she says, though she doubts that’s possible. “There really is nothing out there.”

Grim Prospects

Tuck glimpsed the grimmest possible version of his family’s future in January, when he drove to nearby Newark to apply for public health assistance for his kids in case he can’t find work before the Cobra insurance policy he signed up for after leaving Lloyds runs out. There, he recognized other former bankers, all averting their eyes, and learned he qualified for food stamps. “That was one of the lowest days so far,” he says.

He’s contemplating a reverse migration to the U.K., where his University of Bristol education and international experience might mean more. Maria comes from a close family and is reluctant to move, so if he finds something in Britain, he might go alone. He has also applied for two jobs in Abu Dhabi.

“We have no income coming in,” he says. “I’m just trying to get by. I don’t know what the end scenario is going to be.”

The Robertses have found getting out of Ridgewood is easier said than done. They put their house on the market for $899,000 in October and had to lower the price three times before getting a contract -- for $760,000. That fell through in March. As of mid-April, they had a new contract for $775,000.

Shrinking Nest Egg

They’ve lined up a rental house in South Newfane, Vermont, for $1,800 a month, roughly half their current mortgage payment. Next, Roberts must figure out how to stop the money drain, which has reduced his nest egg by half to $720,000. More than 70 percent of the money disappeared in the market crash, he says, lamenting that he didn’t act on his own prediction that a recession was coming.

“As an economist, I have no excuse whatsoever,” he says.

The family still has fixed expenses, including $1,500 a month for Cobra--a necessity, since Deborah’s MS medications alone cost $1,000 a month. Then there’s the Bennington tuition for Mickey, although he may now qualify for financial aid.

Part of the appeal of Vermont was leaving the routine of the past two decades. Roberts is thinking about consulting or teaching, he says. And he’s been talking with a startup company that finances the production of coffee in Colombia and then imports it.

That country’s history of drug violence and kidnapping of foreigners doesn’t discourage him. “Right now,” he says, “Colombia doesn’t look as dangerous as Wall Street.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Clothier in Atlanta at mclothier@bloomberg.net; John Helyar in Atlanta jhelyar@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 27, 2009 10:34 EDT