GROWING up in Minneapolis, Win Hornig never dreamt of a career on Wall Street. His father was a lawyer and there were no financiers in the family. However, at college he and many of his friends “caught the bug”, he said.

Fortunes were being made in finance and Wall Street seemed like a ticket to the big time. Hornig felt lucky when in 2006 he signed on with the investment bank Bear Stearns as a junior analyst.

Considering the hours he was working - Hornig often put in 100 hours a week - the pay wasn’t so great. Junior analysts make about $60,000 (£32,800) a year and can expect a $10,000 bonus.

“I didn’t have sheets on my bed for three months because I didn’t have time to buy them. My parents couldn’t understand why I was working so hard for so little money,” said Hornig, now 25.

What spurred him on, and thousands of others, was the promise of big money in the future. Within 12 months he was a first-year associate banker - who can make $95,000 a year and expect $140,000 in bonus.

According to Wallstreet-oasis.com, a website where bankers anonymously post their wages, in their third year an associate banker makes $130,00 in salary and a $203,000 bonus.

But for Horning and many more besides, that dream was over almost as soon as it had begun. Bear Stearns was the first of the big investment banks to go bust. He moved to JP Morgan but, as the credit crunch tightened, found his workload diminishing.

At a loose end one evening for the first time in months, he went to dinner with a friend at a plush restaurant. The service was terrible, he said, but the friend had also invited Joyce Huang, 25, who worked at Lehman Brothers.

Hornig and Huang became an item: neither would have had time to have dinner if it hadn’t been for the credit crunch. “We didn’t have the time to go out,” he said.

In short order, Hornig lost his job at JP Morgan, and then last weekend the couple sat watching Sunday night football and wondering if Huang would also lose hers. Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Monday. She is still unsure of her fate.

“I’ve seen the best times and the worst times,” said Hornig. “I didn’t see this coming but there was a general sense that things were not going to last.”

He and Huang “have lost a lot in terms of earnings and job stability but we have a really strong relationship that we wouldn’t have had if we were both working as much as we were during the height of the market”.

He said Wall Street friends are now going back to college or looking for new careers. “I have a lot of friends who grew up wanting to be teachers but somehow they ended up at AIG. Finance pulled in all sorts of people from different backgrounds and interests because of the buzz and what was going on.

“I don’t think you’ll see those people on the margins working on Wall Street. Maybe people will be more interested in other areas.”

Hornig is in talks about a new job and is thinking of setting up a website for former bankers like himself who are looking at what to do with their time and their money, or lack of it. He and Huang have bought a web address, Bankergonebroke.com.

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