I am often asked about the many software products on the market and internet. These products include Suze Orman’s Will & Trust Kit, Quicken WillMaker, LegalZoom.com Parents often think that they can utilize these tools to get the legal protections they need to safeguard their children. Sadly, we never know what we don’t know until it’s too late.

I like the analogy made by Alexis Martin Neely: “It’s kind of like if you built your own house during the summer when the weather was really good and you thought you knew what you were doing, but unknowingly overlooked a key element like putting waterproof felt between the sheeting and the shingles (who would know that, I thought you’d just put the shingles right on the wood). You might not find out right away that you had overlooked this important item, but a couple years later the sheeting would start to rot away and by the third winter you’d have rain and snow in your house and by the time you figured out what you had done wrong, it’d be too late to do anything about it.”

I personally tested several legal document preparation tools. In every case there was a detail overlooked, or a situation that wasn’t considered, that resulted in significantly compromised documents. Translation: in a crisis your family might have no protection.

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Jorge Ramos has won eight Emmy Awards and has been the anchor for Univision News for the last twenty-one years. He has appeared on NBC’s Today, CNN’s Talk Back Live, ABC’s Nightline, and Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor, among others, and is the bestselling author of No Borders: A Journalist’s Search for Home and Dying to Cross. In his career he has been in many dangerous places.

Recently, Jorge was on the CBS’s Early Show to talk about his new book. He told about how one sunny morning he was driving to his dentist’s office when suddenly a van almost hit him head on and killed him. That shock, more than all the horrors he had witnessed as a journalist, brought him face to face with his own mortality.

He realized that he had almost lost the opportunity to tell his story to his children. His response was to write another book, The Gift of Time: Letters from a Father. In it, according to Barnes & Noble, he “reflects upon the world we live in and shares his love for his children in a series of letters that touch on everything from love and divorce to soccer and e-mail.”

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Your reaction to this subject line might be, “Oh no, not another Anna Nicole Smith story.” You might also be thinking, “Great, maybe the inside story!” Whatever your reaction, you should be wondering if any of what happened in her life and death could happen to your family. Simply put, have you taken the steps necessary to prevent such drama and turmoil for your loved ones?

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