You probably think you know what's inside the folder your parents keep labeled "Important Papers," the one everyone assumes counts as an estate plan. I used to have a guess. I was wrong.
Here's the myth I want to knock down before anything else: a folder full of documents is not the same thing as an estate plan, and treating the two as equal is exactly how families end up standing in probate court arguing about what dad "would have wanted." Quick disclosure since software is coming up fast: some of the tool links below are affiliate links, meaning I earn a small commission if you use them, at no extra cost to you. I only link to what I've actually run my own family's paperwork through.
The Myth: A Full Folder Isn't an Estate Plan
My father kept a manila folder behind his tax returns for years, and I assumed it held whatever would make this part easy. It didn't. Inside were three life insurance brochures from decades earlier, a receipt for a lawnmower repair, and a hand-drawn map to a safe deposit box that hadn't existed since the branch closed long before he stopped updating the map in his head. No will. No power of attorney. Just a stack of intentions he'd never turned into anything a judge could act on.
As a reference librarian, finding information for people is what I do all day, and I still felt useless staring at that folder. A pile of documents that reads like a plan but isn't one is worse than an empty drawer, because it buys everyone false confidence right up until the moment it matters. That's the audit I'd push every reader to run this week: pull the folder, and check whether each page inside it is something a court would actually recognize, not just something that sounds official.
Two Witnesses, No Notary: What Indiana Actually Requires
Here's where the myth gets specific. Most people assume a will needs a notary stamp to count, and in Indiana, that's simply not true. What the state actually requires is two witnesses watching you sign, full stop. No notary in the room, no raised seal, and no handwritten will either, since Indiana is one of the states that flatly refuses to recognize a holographic one no matter how sincere the handwriting looks. When I finally sat down to move the probate paperwork for my father's modest estate, that gap between "looks legal" and "is legal" was the whole problem, and it's why I went looking for software instead of a mahogany desk. I started with WillMaker because it builds that Indiana logic in automatically instead of making me guess it. There's also a self-proving clause you can attach to the will, a separate page that keeps your witnesses from ever needing to show up in court later to confirm they actually signed, though walking through how to fill that one out is its own topic entirely.
Do You Need a Lawyer to Make Any of This Legal?
Short answer: not for most of what sits in a kitchen-table estate. WillMaker covers 49 states, leaving out Louisiana entirely because it runs on a civil law system that doesn't map onto the interview format the other 49 states share. For the rest of us, the software works like a very patient version of asking a stranger for directions: it asks questions in plain language and builds the document from the answers. The beneficiary worksheet is the piece that actually earns its keep, since it flagged that I hadn't named a contingent for my brother before I'd even finished the main will, which is exactly the kind of gap that turns into a very expensive legal problem if you both go at once. A financial power of attorney is a different animal here, since Indiana's version does require notarization even though the will doesn't. I watched my mother's shoulders drop the day she signed hers, her pen dragging slow across paper still warm from the printer, one laminated page, notarized, and she looked less frightened holding it than she had in months.
Sorting the Random Forms Through LawDepot
Not everything that needed handling was about death. My mother decided to rent out the finished basement to help with the bills, and the kitchen cabinets were coming off their hinges, so a will-drafting tool wasn't going to cover either problem. That's where LawDepot earned its spot. Its library runs into the hundreds of forms and covers the paperwork nobody thinks to plan for until it's urgent. I pulled a residential lease sturdier than the template I'd found at the office supply store, added a no-smoking clause, and didn't have to pay again to edit it later. When the tenant eventually moved out, I wrote separately about how to write a security deposit demand letter using LawDepot tools, since that turned into its own small mess. For an actual will, though, I'd point people to a fuller comparison of the two platforms I laid out elsewhere, because a subscription form library and a one-time will kit solve different problems. Deanna Frick, a homeowner over in Carmel who first emailed me one Sunday night, close to 10pm, after realizing she had no plan behind the house she'd just bought, was reaching for the wrong tool before I redirected her. I pointed her toward her own library card first. Carmel Clay Public Library, like a lot of branches, quietly carries the same LawDepot access behind a login most patrons never think to check before paying for it themselves.
When Tax Prep Software Became My Job Too
Somewhere in the middle of settling the estate, my father's CPA retired, and I found that out only after I'd called expecting him to just handle it like always. Filing a final return for someone who died mid-year works differently than an ordinary 1040, and I had no accounting training and no interest in paying a new firm's onboarding fees to learn on my own dime. I switched to E-file.com because my mother's income fell comfortably under the basic tier's limits, and the prior-year import pulled in most of the CPA's last filing from a PDF without me having to hunt down old account numbers by hand. It's not glamorous software. The navigation hides the back button in places that make you nervous, but it worked, and I later used the same tool to help my brother sort out filing taxes for a side hustle he'd started that year.
Building the Folder That Actually Works
So back to the original question: what should actually be sitting in that folder? A will drafted with something like WillMaker and signed under Indiana's two-witness rule is the anchor, but it's not the whole structure. A living will spells out medical decisions before a hospital ever has to guess at them, and it's usually the fastest document to knock out first if you're starting from nothing. For a modest estate, a small-estate affidavit can skip full probate altogether, which is worth checking before anyone assumes the full court process is mandatory. A personal property memorandum is just a plain list of who gets which ring or which tool bench, and it can ride alongside the will without requiring its own attorney visit.
Property needs its own documents too. A transfer-on-death deed can move a house to whoever you name without probate ever touching it, while a quitclaim deed handles the different situation of property changing hands between family members while everyone's still alive. A revocable living trust does more of this automatically if an estate is complicated enough to need one, though nothing that came out of my father's folder was.
Then there's everything that isn't legally binding but matters just as much once someone's actually gone. A letter of instruction, one page telling whoever's in charge where to look and who to call, closes gaps that no legal form covers. A running inventory of digital accounts matters just as much, since none of this works if nobody can log into anything. Small changes later get handled with a codicil instead of redrafting a will from scratch. And a HIPAA authorization lets a doctor actually talk to whoever's holding medical power of attorney instead of citing privacy law at them, which my neighbor Myrna calls "bureaucratic wallpaper" every time a federal form lands on my counter. She's not entirely wrong.
None of that requires a law degree to execute correctly. It requires checking, page by page, whether what's in the folder would actually hold up in front of a judge who has never met your family, rather than trusting that a full drawer means a finished job. That's the audit worth running now, not someday.