Single & Struggling – Step 5: The Mildred Pierce Path to Success

In Step 5 of the Single & Struggling series, we shift from survival to self-reliance—and inspiration comes from an unexpected place: the classic film Mildred Pierce.

After organizing your finances, prioritizing what matters most, breaking the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, and setting SMART goals, this episode is about something deeper—believing in your ability to create income and opportunity for yourself.

Mildred’s story is a powerful reminder that when everything else falls away, your skills, resilience, and determination can carry you forward. She didn’t wait for the perfect plan—she used what she had, built from there, and transformed her life.

In this episode, we explore how you can:

•  Identify and leverage your own skills and strengths 
•  Turn everyday abilities into income opportunities 
•  Build confidence through self-reliance 
•  Continue moving from financial chaos into control 

This isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress. One step, one decision, one opportunity at a time.

Because sometimes, the path forward isn’t found in a spreadsheet…
 it’s found in trusting yourself to rise.

💬 Have a question or comment? Contact Jerry here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Remember to seek competent tax legal and investment advice that is unique to your personal situation. Hey everybody, welcome to the Pink Funny Podcast. I'm your host, Jerry Williams, and we talk about all things related to money from a queer perspective. And I'm glad you joined me today. This is the number five in our single and struggling series. And what we've been doing is just just going through a series of steps, learning how to pull us out of a difficult situation that a lot of people find themselves in. And I'm giving you practical, easy to follow steps. There may be easy to follow, but they may not be easy to implement. But that's, you know, different story. But I'm going to recap and let's just quickly go through what we've been doing so far. And so we know that number one, uh, we just gathered all of our bills. We gathered everything that we pay money to, people that we owe money to, etc. And we pulled it all together, and that was the first time that we were able to take a look at where we're at. Now, some of the things that I may not have mentioned is if you're a person who's paperless, like a lot of us are going these days, you need to print out the statements or what have you. Let's say you're a student loan servicer, you need to print that out as well, and you know, put it in the pile because we want to see everything. And seeing it is the first step of gaining control over this chaos. And we want to have everything, like I said, all laid out. And this may be the first time we can actually see, you know, the force for the trees. So then the second step that we took at that point is then prioritizing everything. And we kind of did that through our financial triage. And we went through red, meaning stuff that needs to be handled right away, yellow, very urgent, blue, not as urgent, and then black for everything else. You can use any system you want, but it's just a simple and easy way to categorize, like say, the priority of the things that we're tackling. And so when you're going through and you're making these conversations happen with all these various companies, hopefully you've roped in some assistance, either through, you know, AI or what have you. I find that helpful, but whatever you use in order to help facilitate some of those conversations. And a lot of those, again, we wanted to ask for time. And time is our ally, and it's always equally as important as our income because we need time to get ourselves upright, and we need time to manip not manipulate, but to implement our plan. And so our plan is again to get everything settled so that we can make better and more strategic decisions with our money. And we gather all of our dollars and we pull them all together so that we know how much that we have and we then can start to pay people appropriately. And if we've been able to get a little bit of time, that gives us a little bit of breathing room. Like let's say your student loans. And if you have student loans, call your loan servicer and just say what options are available to me. It may be a forbearance, it may be my refinance, it could be, you know, a fresh start, who knows? Okay. But once you start these conversations with your creditors, then that's going to open up the door as a possibility. And then you've tackled them, and so at least we know where we're at. And in the financial triage system, like I mentioned, it's really up to you to prioritize things for you. When the wolves are knocking out your door, you really again have to say what's important to me, and that's keeping a roof over your head, making sure we protect our transportation, which protects our income, and then we make sure that we have the creature comforts that we need to survive air, water, etc. And so as we move out of the financial triage, because we again we don't stay on fire forever, then we move into what I call breaking the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. And then that's where 60% of Americans are, where again, you run out of money and then all you can do is hope and pray till the next payday comes. And we don't want to remain in that either, because it may be common, but it's not normal. And we're in the process of reducing chaos and moving us out of all this into a normal way of managing our money. These are new skills, new habits that we're learning today, and they're going to be useful to us not only today, tomorrow, but the rest of our lives. We're always going to use the same process of handling our financial situations. So in the breaking paycheck to paycheck cycle, we again prioritize what's important to us, and we have to determine the pain points in our life that are causing us to overspend and not live within our means. That is the realistic look that we take at our, take a look at our financial situation, and we have to make some of those difficult choices that maybe we don't want to, but we have to. That's up to you. You decide what you need to do. It can be a pretty clear path in terms of I have to manage my debt this way, debt snowball, debt avalanche. I have to use so much money for keeping a roof over my head. But if I'm using 50% of my income on that, then that's not sustainable. But a credit consumer credit counseling service can be a great way to lay everything out. They can also help you create a payment plan. That is one of the best ways to get yourself out of this cycle. They can also help stop the interest rate that accumulates because that's doing us no good. And you they can make those negotiations happen without you having to do it all on your own because it's a lot. It is a lot, and there's a a certain technique and skill that goes into it. We don't all have that. I don't even have some of those skills myself. But the whole point here is we rely on the people that we need to when we need them, and that's what makes it helpful to us because we can't do everything on our own as much as we want to, or sometimes we have to, but we always want to make sure we use the right people when we need them. So after we move out of our paycheck by paycheck analysis, we're going into our setting goals. And we talked about SMART goals, but SMART goals are really they're strategic, they're measurable, they're achievable, and they are time-based. And so what you're really looking at is ways that you can measure your progress. So let's say we're starting off with what I consider the most important thing is paying yourself first to build that emergency fund for you because we need a safety net. If something goes wrong and we fall down, we need something to catch us. And that catch is uh, or that safety net is going to be our cash, our ready available cash that we can tap into when we need it. Savings, money market, what have you. We don't want to tie it up in a certificate of deposit, a lot of people say to do that. We don't want to put it in, let's say a short-term bond fund, a lot of people say to do that, a high yield fund, all these other tips and tricks. Right now, what we're doing is just creating a basic simple savings account. So again, we where we can accumulate money because we need it when we need it. We don't need it every day, right? Because that's not helpful. We want to use a saving strategy that makes sure that we're saving some, maybe not what we really need, but let's say it's a dollar a day, 10 bucks a week, what have you. What we're doing is building that saving muscle. And maybe not common to us at this point, but we're changing the behavior so that this becomes second nature to us. Savings just becomes a regular habit. And as I mentioned before, you're just as important as everything else. You're your own creditor and you have to pay yourself first. There's a lot of different ways to look at that. Start small, we can build on that. We can't build on nothing though. So we have to start somewhere. And a simple dollar a day, that may be a place to get you going. But you know what you can do, work with those experts, work with you know AI to help create your strategy for you. So these goals, I think of short-term goals anywhere between one to five years. Now you could break it up into even shorter, six months. You know, I'm gonna have my first thousand dollars, five hundred dollars. That may be what one way to do it. So you keep building, building, building, pushing that goal out there to bigger and better. I'm going to my first thousand, I'm going to my first five thousand, ten thousand, whatever. So we continue to build. Now we have a lot of priorities in our life, and we start to get a lot of things jumbled up in our head because we think, well, I've got to save for retirement, I have to say for you know my college education for my child. I need to, I need to get it. I I don't know what to do anymore because I have all these tugs at my money. So you just create a simple pyramid, and it always starts at the foundation, and that's protection. And protection begins with, like I said, the safety net. Is that everything in that safety net bucket? It's not. Because we also need to make sure we protect our income. If you're working, you definitely want to take out something like short-term disability, long-term disability, because that again is a means to protect our income. Anything could happen to us during the time that we're in this this this single and struggling situation, right? Because we don't want to be here forever, we're just here right now. And so if we don't take some of the steps to protect our income and it fails us, the company closes, we get laid off, you know, they let you go, whatever it is. We don't want that to become a huge problem for us that becomes life threatening to our financial situation, not to us personally, right? We're not gonna die. What I'm saying is what if our income stops, then what? We don't really have anybody to fall back on. Can you go back to mom and dad? You may not be able to tap them anymore. How about grandpa, grandma? Maybe the same situation. You've already, you know, you they've given you as much as they can. So you want to make sure that you have those kind of protections for you in place. And usually there is like a little waiting period where they don't pay you right away. There's maybe a 30-day, 60-day, whatever it is. And then sometimes, most times actually, they're not even going to pay you 100% of your salary. They will pay you maybe 60, 70 if you're lucky, because they they are saying if we just pay you your salary, then you're not going to have an incentive to go back to work. So they pay you less than that because they know that you need that to live on. And so there's a greater incentive for you to get back into the job force, the workforce, what have you. So you again can start back up and reclaim your full income. So we always want to protect our income and we put that into the lowest foundation or the lowest part of the pyramid, creating that solid foundation for ourselves. Make sense? So as we go up, you know, if you have children as well, I didn't mention this, but you always need to take out life insurance you through your job, if nothing else, ideally through an outside company, because you may not be with your job forever. Sometimes those are portable, sometimes they're not. It's a lot of hassle, but you always want to take out life insurance while you're young and you're in good health. Our health can change at any time, our situation changes at any time. You may think, I don't even need life insurance because I'm the only person. You may not be the only person forever, right? One day or if you get in a long-term relationship, you decide to get married. There's all kinds of situations that can occur where you need life insurance. I'm not a life insurance salesman. I'm just saying the important of life insurance is always gonna be there. How much you need all depends on your situation. I say if you're young, take out a million dollars. It's gonna be pennies, really. It's not gonna cost you anything. But the fact is, once you get insured and you go through the whole insurance process where they check your height, weight, blood pressure, they draw three vials of blood, etc., they go through all that and you get approved, then you've already done that hard work, Ned. You just have to pay the monthly premium. And even if you can't do it for yourself, maybe somebody else will pick up that premium for a while. Anyway, the beneficiary is a whole nother situation. I won't go into all that right now. That's a whole nother beast. But I'm just saying protection is what we're looking at. Short-term disability, long-term disability is important as the safety nets that we need to keep us afloat if something goes awry. So when we're continuing to build on our goals, we, like I said, have their debt reductionist debt reduction strategy, whether it's a specific strategy or you use like the debt snowball or the debt avalanche. The debt snowball is where you pay off little things first, and then you go to the next bigger one, and it gives you that sense of accumulation. Like I've I've made some progress by paying off this at least this little one. Now I'm going to move to the next one. The debt avalanche is where you start with highest interest rates first and you tack those because you're losing the most money on those, and then you go down. Once you pay that off, you go to the next one, put that money there, put and down you go. You can create your own debt avalanche, debt snowball, what have you. Use artificial intelligence because they think it's extremely helpful, but that's up to you. And once you have all this in place, we are utilizing our time. And time is equally as important as our income because we need time for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes when we're in the financial triage, we need time to get ourselves straightened out. We need time to breathe. We need time to make good, rational, solid decisions. We don't want to panic and we want to be in control. Our whole thought here in this process is moving from chaos into control. We're not aiming for protection, but what we're aiming for is progress. And as we move through step one, step two, step three, step four, and now we're at step five, we're continually making progress, and that's what we want. And where we're at now, step five, the thing that I'm gonna recommend you do is watch a movie. I know that sounds kind of silly, right? But let me let me explain why. There's a movie out there that I really love. I think if you're gay, you know exactly who I'm talking about, and this is Joan Crawford. Everybody knows Joan Crawford, right? And Betty Davis. They had this rivalry throughout their lives, but they're both very, very talented people, and they made some of the best movies out there. And one of the best movies, in my opinion, is Mildred Pierce, where Joan Crawford plays the heroine. And what happens in this movie is I'm not going to give you the toll thing because it's I don't want to spoil it for you, but the reason I'm saying watch this is because she goes from being married to being a single mom because she goes through a divorce, and then she's all on her own. And what's really inspiring in this story to me is she recognizes the fact that she has no one else to fall back on, and she doesn't have any other resources really. Luckily, uh, in this case, she has a house. I don't know all the mechanics of how she's able to remain in this home. They don't go into like, does she get child support or what have you from her husband? But we're just gonna go with the Hollywood version. Anyway, so uh Joan, Mildred in this case, she's in her house and she's relying on her skills, and she realizes what she really has is the capability of making pies. That's what she's good at. So she starts making pies for her neighbors, etc., and it just grows from there. It grows to the point that she actually ends up buying a restaurant and become becoming an owner of this restaurant, and then it even grows from there, and she opens multiple restaurants. But the reason I say you should watch it, not only did she win the Academy Award for this movie, and that it's an excellent movie, but the fact that there's a lesson here in that when you watch Mildred go through what she's going through, despite everything else that's happening in her life, she really sticks to her guns and she's able to do what she does best, and it ends up bringing in the income that she needs to improve her life. Not only her life, but that of her and her two daughters. And that's very inspiring because there's a lot of things that happen to us where we may not have the income that we need or want, and sometimes it's good to rely on yourself. We're in this whole new world where you working for a company for the next 50 years is probably very unlikely. Now, in my mother's day, she was born in 1938. That's how it was, right? You got one job and you were there for 50 years. A lot of my older friends are still at their jobs that they've had now for 30, 40 years. It's crazy, but they're still there. They're getting ready to retire now. But hey, they've managed to make this far. How? I have no idea, but good on them. Anyway, when you go into your own skill sets and you pick up the things that you do best, I think that that is a great way for you to become self-reliant. If you're not even 100% sure what you do best, maybe ask your friends and family. I bet they have their own perspective on what you do really well. And you need to find a way, in my mind, that you can turn that into an opportunity for you. So maybe you could do substitute teaching, you could do private tutoring, you could do gig writing. Of course, we know the Uber, the DoorDash, etc. I always rely on those examples all the time. But you know, bake cakes, bake pies, bake brownies, whatever it is. If you're good with your hands, you know, and you fix things, be a mechanic, be HVAC, whatever it is. There's a million things that you can do. Be creative, you know, and draw, you know, do pictures of people, whatever. You know, I think that everybody's got a skill somewhere, and we may have forgotten it or let it go get rusty, but you need to put it to work because this is when we really need it. And this could be the key to your success. Who knows? Who knows? You know, if if college is not your thing, that's not a that's not a problem, right? Who cares? College doesn't mean that you're gonna be a success or failure, but why take on all that debt if you don't need to? If you've already got a few years behind you and you've like had it, then move on to the next thing. That's okay. You know, who's judging you? Nobody. Well, you know, they may, but you know, you don't need their judgment. Who cares? You just do what you think is best for you. Anyway, my whole point here is that you've made this progress from just straight up chaos, and you've moved through just simple gathering and prioritizing and putting red, green, blue, and black on your priority piles, and you've made the tough phone calls, and you've got roped other people in, like the consumer credit counseling or AI or what have you, and you finally are getting some control over your life, and now you're starting to strategically deploy your dollars into the things that matter most. Like I said, protections for safety, our protecting our income with an emergency fund, with disability insurance, short-term, long-term. And as I mentioned, I would strongly encourage you to buy life insurance. Another story that I'll get into later on. But we're gonna use our money to the best degree that we can because that's what we want to do. And we're always going to pay ourselves first. It doesn't mean you're gonna pay yourself half your paycheck. No, it does mean we are going to start using that savings muscle and continually build it, whether it's a daily contribution for yourself of just a buck or whatever it is. And then we go into the whole strategy to break our habit or this cycle of paycheck to paycheck. We don't want to be in that anymore, we're not gonna be in that anymore. And you should set one of your goals as never falling back into the paycheck to paycheck cycle. That's not a way to live, it's a way to fail. And we're we don't want to be a failure, we want to be a success, and you can be successful if you follow some of these steps. I'm not saying you have to follow them to the nth degree, but you get the general purpose of each step, and they're designed again for you to take control of your situation and move yourself through each of these phases. And the Mildred Pierce phase is really when you rely on yourself, and I think that is extremely empowering. And this podcast does fulfill, in my mind, the whole mission of providing educating educating entertainment, education, empowerment, and enlightenment. Those are the things that I think really matter, and whether you're in the LGBT community or not, it doesn't matter either, right? Because these messages are universal and you should apply them specifically to your world. And as I mentioned, if you're not in this world right now, in terms of you're at not at the beginning, you've managed through all of this, good on you. Help other people if you can share this podcast and make sure that as you need help, you get the help you need. And you in turn can also help others equally because we all need a helping hand sometime. And we learn from each other. That's how we learn. We all learn from each other. I didn't learn everything you know through osmosis. You know, I'd learned others, I'd learn through books. I have you know gone through this school of hard knocks myself. And that's no fun. But those are the ways that we learn sometimes it's difficult, hopefully sometimes we learned our lesson and we don't fall back into that and then other times we learn what not to do because we learn from others who tell us don't do that. You don't always need to touch the stove when someone says it's hot. Don't do it. If you're compelled to do it then you get burned and that's what you get for not listening. Anyway I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you're gaining a lot from this series and I hope that this improves your life. We're nearing the end you're nearing the end of this series because we only have I think uh one more episode is gonna come out after this one and I'll tell you it's another heroin and another movie and I will get to that next time that you listen. So other than that I hope that you have a great day and I wish you all the success. Thank you for listening.