The legal pad on my kitchen table gets filled from the bottom up, a line crossed off every time the printer down the hall finishes another page. Three years of our family's estate-planning has crossed that table, and here is the short version before I get into it: for a simple Indiana estate, WillMaker is the DIY legal tool I keep reaching for. This WillMaker review is really a record of what printed legally at my kitchen table, no billable-hour panic attached, just honest probate-preparation from a reference librarian who got tired of the quotes.
A quick note before anything else. Every will-software, legal-form, and tax link below pays me a small referral fee if you subscribe through it, and your price stays exactly the same either way. My household ran all of these through real paperwork over the past year, and the referral income just keeps me testing the next platform so these notes stay grounded in actual ink and toner.
You Don't Need to Call a Lawyer
When I started sorting Mom's paperwork after Dad died, my first instinct wasn't software. I called the county clerk's office to ask what she actually needed, and the person on the line told me, kindly but firmly, to consult a licensed attorney. Fair enough. So I priced a few. On a normal day my job is the hold queue and helping a patron chase down a call number, so the hourly quotes for what amounted to a house, a car, and a stack of sentiment felt like paying research rates to reshelve three books. Our estate wasn't complicated. It was ordinary, and ordinary is exactly what kitchen-table software is built for.
The Self-Proving Clause, Plainly
Here is the one piece of jargon worth learning. A self-proving clause is just the page that saves your kids a court hearing. In Indiana, two witnesses can make a will valid with no notary at all. The self-proving clause is the optional extra on top: an affidavit where you and those same two witnesses sign once more, this time in front of a notary, all swearing the will is genuinely yours. Do that page, and after you're gone the court can accept the will without tracking down your witnesses to testify that they watched you sign. Skip it, and your family might spend an afternoon in a courtroom proving something everyone already knew. If you're reading from another state, check what your own software says, because the rules shift at the border.
Handwritten Wills Don't Count Here
One myth worth killing is the movie scene where someone scrawls their last wishes on a napkin and it somehow holds up in court. Indiana does not recognize holographic wills. A handwritten document signed only by you, with no witnesses, is not a valid will in this state, no matter how detailed it is or how plainly you meant it. The flip side surprises people: a handwritten will does count in Indiana if two proper witnesses sign it alongside you. So the magic was never the handwriting. It was always the witnesses. States can differ wildly on this, and some run on a completely different legal footing. Louisiana, for one, follows a civil-law system rooted in the Napoleonic Code, which most national DIY kits tell you up front they can't handle.
WillMaker Earned Its Keep at My Kitchen Table
WillMaker became the heavy lifter at that table. It covers 49 states, everywhere but Louisiana, and it writes the state-specific language so you aren't comparing statutes yourself. The whole thing runs like an interview. It asks plain questions, you give plain answers, and the document assembles behind the scenes. What sold me wasn't the will by itself. The package bundles more than 35 estate and personal-finance documents, so in one sitting I drafted a living trust, a healthcare directive, and a financial power of attorney for Mom, the durable kind that lets someone step in if she can't sign for herself. I ignored the quick-fill shortcuts and read the dense help text instead, because I wanted to understand every page before I signed it. If you're just getting your footing, I set the stage in Best Legal Document Software for Beginners Doing Estate Planning.
A Table That's Mostly Mom's Mail
Most of this was never really about the will. It was about Mom's mail. Around the fifth week of working through the drift of envelopes that collected under her toaster, I nearly closed the insurer's browser tab before the homeowners declarations page caught my eye, and that glance was how I found out her policy had quietly lapsed. Paperwork you can't find is its own kind of emergency. I've written more about turning that sort of pile into something you can actually file in Best Way to Organize Legal Documents After a Parent Passes Away.
The spring after Dad died, I sat with my brother Vance at his counter and we drafted his will with a laptop between us. Vance trusts a printed checklist over anyone's spoken promise, so we worked down the list one line at a time. The software flagged that he'd named a main heir but no backup, exactly the kind of gap in a beneficiary list that I cover in full in another piece. I can still picture the cursor blinking in an empty name field while he checked, twice, that his backup's legal name was spelled right, refusing to guess.
Not every reader is family. A history teacher from Avon named Sylvester Enright wrote to me late one night after his mother's estate hit a snag; she had died without a will, and he was trying to work out what came next. Sylvester screenshots every step of every online form he opens, so his follow-up questions land in my inbox with the exact screen attached. Readers like him are the reason I keep notes like this one plain and honest.
Filling the Odd-Form Gaps With LawDepot
WillMaker didn't cover the odd jobs. When we rented the basement to a grad student to ease Mom's mortgage, I pulled a residential lease from LawDepot, which keeps more than 400 legal forms behind a single subscription, and I later grabbed a one-page contractor agreement from the same place for the kitchen reno. You describe the situation in plain words and the interview hands you the right form, which is a mercy when you don't know the legal name of what you need. The tip I give every patron who asks at my desk: check your library card first, because plenty of public libraries include LawDepot access in 30-day windows through their database list, sometimes under a different product name, and you may not owe a cent. The one thing to mind is the billing, which renews every month on its own, so I set a reminder, took what I needed, and cancelled before the next cycle. That whole basement-tenant errand is written up in Creating a Simple Rental Agreement for a Basement Tenant with LawDepot.
When Tax Season Lands on You Too
Estate paperwork wasn't the end of it. Dad's CPA retired the same season the filing landed on me, and a librarian is not an accountant. E-file.com carried me through the worst of it. The federal return was free for a household as plain as ours, and the feature I leaned on hardest was the prior-year import: point it at a PDF of last year's 1040 and it lifts most of the numbers over so you're not retyping every line from scratch. Handling a parent's final return is its own separate errand, and if your family bookkeeper stepped away the way ours did, I walked through that whole scramble in Filing Your Own Taxes After Your Family CPA Retires This Year.
What I'd Tell You Across the Reference Desk
If there's one thing to carry off a table that used to disappear under folders, it's this: DIY software is the right tool when your estate is ordinary, meaning a house, an account or two, and heirs who are easy to name. It stops being the right tool when things tangle, meaning a large or blended estate, a special-needs beneficiary, or anything that really wants a professional's eyes. Even then the software earns its keep, because you draft the bones yourself and the attorney checks your work instead of building it from scratch on the clock. One habit worth adopting from the start: write down where your online accounts and passwords live, since a perfectly valid will means little if your family is locked out of everything digital. If you've been circling your own pile with that librarian itch to sort it into order, WillMaker is where I'd start.