In case you missed all of the commercials for floral arrangements that have been airing recently, here’s one final reminder: Mother’s Day is this Sunday, May 9th.

But before you spend your money on something that will wilt and die within a week or two, consider getting Mom a truly priceless gift—a plan for her kids (or grandkids) that provides her with peace of mind that, when something should happen to her and dad, her children will always be in the care of the people she knows, loves, and trusts.

It Can Happen to You

No one likes to think that something unexpected might happen to them, even though we know it happens to others just like us. Think about it, there’s an accident, the kids are at home with the babysitter, and mom and dad don’t make it home from their night out.

Yet, due to poor estate planning, the late singer’s children have yet to see a dime of their inheritance, and what they ultimately do receive will be significantly depleted by back taxes. Moreover, it’s still not clear whether or not Aretha ever had a valid will.

When she passed away in August 2018, her family thought that Aretha died without any estate plan at all. But since then, four different wills attributed to the late singer have been discovered. And ever since those documents came to light, her four adult sons—Clarence, Edward, Ted White Jr., and Kecalf—have been in court fighting one another over her assets, as well as who among them should be designated as the estate's representative.

This was exactly the case for my mentor, Ali Katz, who went from losing $1 million to running a company that earns over $5 million a year. Indeed, Ali was able to not only learn from her early missteps as a lawyer and businesswoman, but she capitalized on those lessons by creating New Law Business Model, which trains lawyers like me to help families and business owners not repeat the same expensive mistakes she made.

Here, we share four of the most important lessons Ali learned on her way to success, which have been adapted from a recent Grow By Acorns article Ali was featured in.

Last week in part one of this series, we offered a brief synopsis of the movie, which revolves around Marla Grayson, a crooked professional guardian who makes her living by preying on vulnerable seniors, and we then outlined the true events that inspired the fictional account. The film’s writer and director, J. Blakeson, came up with the idea after reading news stories of a similar scam involving a corrupt professional guardianship agency in Las Vegas.

In that case, a real-life Marla Grayson named April Parks, who owned a company called A Private Professional Guardian, was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison in 2018 after being indicted on more than 200 felonies for using her guardianship status to swindle more than 150 seniors out of their life savings. While I Care a Lot is fictional, the Parks case also inspired the 2018 documentary, The Guardians, directed by award-winning filmmaker Billie Mintz, and his film details the terrifying true events that ravaged the Nevada guardianship industry.

The CTA is an update to the federal government’s anti-money laundering laws and is designed to crack down on shell companies created for illicit financial activities, such as money laundering and funding terrorist organizations.

While the CTA is aimed at providing greater transparency into who owns and controls small businesses in the U.S., it stands to impact many legitimate small companies by requiring them to provide reports on the identities of their owners. At the same time, the new law may also affect future business transactions, such as mergers and acquisitions, by making the process more logistically complex, with less privacy for certain organizational structures like limited liability companies (LLCs), which have historically been used to avoid disclosing detailed ownership information.