Hannah Whitmore

Contributor at WillPicks

About

Reference librarian, 47, Lawrence Township, suburban Indianapolis. I walked into my parents' kitchen on a Sunday morning in October 2023 and found my father at the table. He had died sometime the night before. No estate plan anyone could locate. Three weeks later a handwritten page turned up in a manila folder behind his 2019 tax returns. Indiana does not recognize holographic wills, so that piece of paper meant nothing in probate court.

The week after the funeral I was at mom's, going through an accordion folder, looking for the car title she needed to sell. The homeowners policy had lapsed two years prior. The safe deposit box had no co-signer listed. The brokerage account still named her college roommate as beneficiary. The papery-dust smell when I pulled open a file box she hadn't touched since the nineties is something I still associate with that whole stretch of weeks.

Three years of paperwork followed. My own will is drafted and signed, two witnesses, self-proving affidavit attached, filed in a binder behind the kitchen junk drawer. My mother's filing cabinet is rebuilt. My brother Vance, who lives in Fishers and operates on the principle of waiting until the last possible moment and then moving fast, finished his own will last spring. We sat at his kitchen counter with a laptop between us and ran it through in one afternoon. The platforms that made it through the stack: WillMaker for the will and healthcare directive, LawDepot for a basement rental agreement and a contractor agreement when we redid the kitchen, E-file.com after dad's CPA retired and the following tax season landed on me without warning.

The credential count is zero: no law degree, no paralegal certificate, no notary commission, nothing to frame on a wall. What there is instead: three years of real paperwork, a reference librarian's habit of going to the source rather than the summary, and a strong opinion about which platforms print the self-proving clause on the first attempt and which ones make you hunt for it. Situations involving estates over $500,000, blended families, or special-needs beneficiaries need attorney review before anything is signed. The software is useful for a wide range of straightforward cases, and my job here is to tell you exactly what it does and where it falls short, not to overstate the DIY ceiling.

Written by Hannah Whitmore

Disclosure

Some links on this site pay a referral fee when you sign up through them. Your price is the same either way. The fee goes back into buying the next platform to test, which is the only way the comparisons stay current. If a tool printed something wrong for my household, the review says so, paid link or not.