The signature page came off the hallway printer still warm, and I slid it into the red accordion folder marked ME. Two folders live at the end of my butcher-block table, one holding my mother's estate planning, one holding mine. A local estate attorney had quoted five hundred dollars just to draft a simple one-page Indiana will, and after my father died I set out to see how much of that grief-and-paperwork pile I could do myself.
A note before I set the two routes side by side. The software links below pay me a small referral fee if you subscribe, and your price stays the same as going direct. My household ran WillMaker, LawDepot, and E-file through real forms, so nothing here is theoretical, and that referral money is what funds the next round of re-testing. Not a lawyer. Just a librarian with a printer and a grudge against hourly billing.
Two Routes to the Same Signed Will
Both routes end at the same place, a will a court will accept without a fight. One runs through a law office and a retainer. The other runs across my kitchen table on a Sunday. Lenora Grady, a senior reference librarian who has shared a break-room shelf with me for twenty years and keeps a color-coded binder for every policy change that crosses our desk, would tell you the whole job is organization, and she is mostly right. The real question was never whether the cheap route works. It is which job belongs to which tool. The software that nailed my mother's will was useless for the basement lease, and the form site that saved the lease would have produced a thin, shaky will.
What Makes an Indiana Will Actually Hold Up?
For the permanent papers, my mother's will, her healthcare directive, her financial power of attorney, I used WillMaker. Think of it as the reference-desk encyclopedia set of estate software. Deep, a little slow, and built to ask the questions a grieving daughter would not think to ask. Its templates adjust the will language for Indiana on their own, so I was not reading statutes at midnight to check my wording. It is desktop software, not a cloud app, though, and the evening my laptop battery died mid-edit I lost the last stretch of work and learned to save early.
A valid will is what keeps your family out of a long stretch of probate, and Indiana is stricter than people expect about what makes one valid. State law requires that the will be signed by you and by two witnesses, each at least eighteen and none of them named as a beneficiary in the will, and each witness has to sign in your presence and in front of each other (Indiana Code § 29-1-5-2). No notary is needed for the will itself here. Two neighbors over coffee will do, as long as neither one stands to inherit.
Here is where I got it wrong the first time. Planning the signing, I lined up my brother and myself as the two witnesses, because we were the two people in the room. WillMaker flagged it before I printed the final copy: in Indiana a witness should not be someone named in the will, or that person's gift can be challenged later. The two people with the most reason to be there were the two who could not sign. We asked a neighbor and a woman from my mother's church instead, neither of whom inherits a dime. Pick witnesses who get nothing.
Mid-draft I hit the self-proving clause requirement and realized WillMaker had already tucked it into the packet, which was the moment two witnesses finally made more sense to me than a notary ever had. I have written more about which suite fits which family tree in my roundup of the Best Online Will Software for DIY Planning at Your Kitchen Table, so I will not rehash it here.
The first three times I printed that will, the margins were wrong. Page scaling set to fit, and the signature line crept under the footer or the witness block split across two pages. I rage-printed the same eleven sheets until the toner light started blinking. When the packet finally came out clean, the bank teller who watched me acknowledge my mother's forms called her manager over, because a home-printed Indiana will with correct margins looked too tidy to be real. Set your printer to actual size, not fit to page. That one setting cost me an afternoon and half a cartridge.
Everything nearly came apart at the signing over a single missing page. Two witnesses at the table, coffee poured, and when I fanned out the packet the signature page was not in it. It had never left the printer tray. So everyone waited while the hallway printer ground the last sheet through with the mechanical whir it makes when the house is otherwise quiet. Now I count every page and lay them in order before anyone sits down. A witness who has to wait is a witness who starts reading the fine print and getting nervous.
Where LawDepot Earns Its Keep
For the messy, one-off paperwork, WillMaker is overkill. That is where LawDepot earned its place on the table. When my mother rented the basement to a family friend to help with the property taxes, I answered a short set of questions about the situation and the site built the lease for me. The rental agreement printed clean on the first pass, and the tenant signed it that same afternoon at the kitchen table, no lawyer and no week of back-and-forth. The interview works like a reference question at the desk. You describe the problem, and the form finds you, instead of you having to know its legal name first.
One thing I did not use LawDepot for was the will itself. Its will templates exist, but they are noticeably thinner than WillMaker's, so I drafted one there once as a test and went straight back to WillMaker for the real document. For a stand-alone job like helping a parent set up a durable power of attorney, either tool can get you there, and I walk through that process in my piece on how to Create a Legal Power of Attorney for Aging Parents Without a Lawyer.
The beneficiary worksheet in WillMaker sent me back through my mother's accounts one at a time, and on a life insurance policy I found my late father still listed as the sole beneficiary years after his death. Catching that before the signing, not after, is the difference between a clean payout and money that sits waiting on a court. We fixed it with the insurer directly. Garnet Tidwell, a widowed neighbor who found my library flyer, later sent me the same worry as item four on one of his numbered lists of questions, and I was glad I had tripped over it first.
When Grief and Paperwork Outrun the Software
A will was not the only thing that landed on me. When my father's CPA retired and closed his practice, his last tax season became mine. The mechanics of a final return for someone who has died are enough of a topic that I kept them in a separate write-up on Filing Your Own Taxes After Your Family CPA Retires This Year. For the filing itself I used E-file.com, mostly because it let me import the prior year straight from a PDF of the CPA's last return. It picked up most of the line items, so I was not retyping depreciation schedules by hand.
DIY tools have one blind spot I would not paper over: blended families. Standard last will and testament templates tend to default to all-to-the-spouse or equal-shares-to-the-children, and in a household with stepchildren that default can quietly disinherit the wrong people. If your family tree has stepchildren, a special-needs beneficiary, or significant assets, print your DIY draft and take it to an attorney for an hour of review. That is the one bill I would tell you to pay.
Choosing the Kitchen Table or the Law Office
A transfer-on-death deed handled the house itself, one page that keeps it from getting tangled in the estate. With that filed, my mother's papers finally sat in one place a stranger could follow, which was the whole point of three years of Sundays.
So which route should you take? Reach for the kitchen table when your estate is what most Indiana households actually have, a house, a couple of accounts, clear heirs, and a will, a directive, and a power of attorney that need to be done right and signed by two disinterested witnesses. Reach for the law office when the picture gets tangled, a blended family, a business, a trust, anyone likely to contest. For the core documents that cover most of us, I would start with WillMaker and a printer set to actual size, then keep the signed copies in a folder your family can find. That, more than any single form, is what spares them from doing all of this the week they are grieving.