On his way to the Super Bowl in Arizona earlier this year, former Bear Stearns exec Stephen Lacoff ran into a former colleague who was on his way to a mortgage conference. They boarded the same plane, but Lacoff, who had taken a buyout package in the fall, flew coach, while the Bear exec sat comfortably up front in first class. Yet, that wasn’t a bad thing.

“It was clear to me that I had the better deal,” says Lacoff, who had worked as a senior managing director in human resources. While his former colleague was pulling long days and taking trips for work, not pleasure, Lacoff was reaping the benefits of Bear’s buyout: 18 months’ salary, a full annual bonus, and other benefits adding up to $450,000. For the 62-year-old Lacoff, it was a fresh start.

“It makes a better story to tell you I’m getting screwed,” says Lacoff, who also held Bear stock that he could have sold—but didn’t—before the firm imploded. “But the truth is I’m not. I’m being treated fairly.”

The industry that invented the hostile takeover and the short squeeze has certainly left a few black eyes and bruised behinds among the thousands of displaced workers caught in the financial sector’s meltdown. By some estimates, the world’s largest banks and investment houses have shed more than 80,000 jobs since the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market last year, and more layoff announcements are expected. Following J.P. Morgan’s purchase of Bear Stearns at a fire-sale price in March, an estimated 10,000 of Bear’s former 14,000 employees now no longer have jobs.

But there are at least some smiling faces among the workers who received buyout and severance packages wrapped in silver lace: double pay for Bear Stearns workers who stayed on during the transition to J.P. Morgan’s ownership; accelerated vesting of restricted stock at companies like Morgan Stanley; and across the industry, cash packages tied to years of service that in some cases amounted to more than a year’s salary.

Lacoff, who worked at Bear for 32 years, says his generous package “was all the difference in the world,” affording him peace of mind and purse as he embarked on a new chapter in his life. After going to the Super Bowl, he spent his first few weeks off  driving his wife to work every day and catching up on sleep and CNBC-watching. But he eventually grew restless, and as luck would have it, Lacoff was soon asked to join an executive search firm managed by a friend who had earlier helped him to update his resume. He started his new job in April, and as he places executives, he’ll earn commission on top of the salary he’ll continue to collect from Bear—now J.P. Morgan—through July 2009.   

Not everyone has been quite as lucky as Lacoff, but for some workers, getting downsized has been a valuable chance to take a step back and fulfill personal goals.

One former Morgan Stanley investment banker, laid off this spring with more than $100,000 in cash-and-stock parting gifts, is planning to spend several weeks climbing mountains in exotic climes, an almost unimaginable luxury during his time at Morgan Stanley, which required him to cancel or postpone vacations on more than one occasion.

The former vice president, who requested anonymity because his severance package requires him not to discuss it publicly, says his package of $25,000 in cash and $80,000 in restricted stock that vested early, together with his wife’s income, will allow him to spend up to two years looking for the right position at a private-equity firm or the right consulting opportunity.

“After the initial shock of ‘Holy shit, I don’t have a job anymore,’ it’s more like ‘Okay, I have some money they paid me; I don’t have to go out and go work at McDonald’s tomorrow,’” he says.

Though he wouldn’t have left on his own, the former banker now says he wouldn’t return to his old job, which he joined in 2004. “I don’t think I would go back, just because my mind is kind of in a different place at this point,” he says.

Sanjeev Naraine, a former videoconferencing expert at Bear who is serving out his last few months as a “transitional” employee for J.P. Morgan, has come upon one of the more inventive responses to his firm’s collapse: a business model for turning corporate layoffs into a social-networking phenomenon.

Naraine is considering plowing his $90,000 goodbye package—30 weeks of salary as severance, “stay pay” that essentially doubles his salary from March to October, and a bonus for 2007—into a company that creates online communities for displaced workers. After Bear’s collapse, he and three former colleagues created Whokilledthebear.com, a community site for ex-Bear employees around the world.

“I just feel it’s an excellent transition tool to reduce the stress of employees” who have been sacked, says Naraine, who's already thinking of registering other sites should more meltdowns occur in the future. One he's got his eyes on now? ForeverLehman.com.