The question of whether a one-paragraph fix to your will is actually cheaper than starting over landed on my kitchen table the week my brother Vance closed on a house in Fishers. Vance sits on a decision for months and then moves in a week once he's ready, so the property swap turned an eighteen-month-old bequest in his section of my will into nonsense with almost no warning. WillMaker, the DIY estate-planning software I used to draft that will in the first place, offered two paths forward: patch the old document with a codicil, or run the whole interview again and print a clean one. Indiana probate law has a strong opinion about which path actually saves paperwork.
Quick disclosure before the comparison: I earn a commission when readers sign up through the WillMaker and LawDepot links on this page, at no extra cost to anyone clicking through. Testing these tools on my own family's paperwork is what funds testing the next one, so treat what follows as one DIY user's field notes, not legal advice.
Two Ways to Fix a Will That's Gone Stale
A codicil is, in plain terms, a patch. Librarians know the same idea from an errata slip, the loose insert that tells a reader page forty-two is wrong without reprinting the whole book. A codicil works the same way: a short document that amends specific clauses in an existing will without touching the rest of it.
The trouble is that patches get separated from the document they're patching. A codicil filed loose in a folder, or worse, never filed at all, creates two competing versions of your wishes, and it's your executor who inherits the job of sorting out which clause wins. That confusion is exactly what turns a routine probate filing into a scavenger hunt.
What a Standalone Codicil Actually Requires
One approach I actually tried: draft a standalone codicil for Vance's changed bequest, typing out the new legal description of his address by hand into a free template. I called the county clerk's office first, hoping for a straight answer on whether a single-clause fix would still need full witnessing. They told me to consult a licensed attorney, which is the standard non-answer government offices give about anything more complicated than a parking ticket.
That non-answer turned out to be useful anyway, because it pushed me back toward legal software tools that already knew the rule instead of guessing at it. A codicil written by hand still has to meet every formality the original will did, so a shortcut that skips the interview questions is a shortcut that skips the parts most likely to catch a mistake.
Rerunning the WillMaker Interview Instead of Patching a Codicil
WillMaker takes a different approach to updates. Instead of asking for a stand-alone amendment, the software reruns the original interview, lets you change only what's changed, and generates an entirely new will that formally revokes the old one.
The moment that actually sold me on the reprint version was watching the WillMaker beneficiary worksheet print out clean on the first pass, every name spelled the way it's spelled on the actual documents, nothing left to double-check by hand. A hand-typed codicil would never catch that, since it only touches the one clause you're thinking about and skips everything you forgot to think about. For a one-off form, like the lease I pulled for a basement tenant, LawDepot's form library is the faster tool. For anything touching who gets what, the interview format works more like a reference interview at the library, circling back to ask about things you didn't know to ask about yourself. My piece on the Best Online Will Software for DIY Planning at Your Kitchen Table goes deeper into how these tools compare if you're starting from nothing.
Why Indiana's Witness Rules Tip the Scale
Indiana doesn't let you shortcut the signing step just because you're only changing one clause. Under Indiana Code 29-1-5-3, a codicil needs the same two witnesses, watching you sign in person, that the original will required. The state doesn't recognize handwritten, unwitnessed changes either, so scribbling a note in the margin and signing it yourself accomplishes nothing legally. A notary isn't required for either document to be valid, but the self-proving clause, the page that keeps your witnesses out of a courtroom years later, only prints correctly when the software already knows which state's rules apply.
If two neighbors are already coming over to witness whatever you sign, there's no real advantage to handing them a thin codicil instead of a complete, current will. Vance and I signed his updated version at a coffee shop near the Fishers District shops, pulling in two people from the next table as witnesses once he'd finally decided he was ready. A full document is also easier for an executor to work with later, since they're not cross-referencing a stack of amendments to figure out which clause is still active and which one got overridden years back. I wrote more about how the witnessing logistics played out at my own table in The Kitchen Table Will: How I Navigated Indiana Estate Planning After My Father Passed.
More Than the Will Changes
A property change is rarely the only thing that goes stale. A durable power of attorney naming an address that's no longer current, or a sibling who's since moved, needs the same kind of refresh a will does. A living will or advance directive can drift out of date just as easily, especially if the person named as healthcare proxy isn't the right call anymore. WillMaker's package also builds out a revocable living trust option for people who want to skip probate on specific property, a personal property memorandum for smaller bequests that don't need a courtroom's attention, and a letter of instruction that reads less like a legal document and more like notes for whoever's left sorting out your paperwork. None of those live inside a codicil either. A transfer-on-death deed for real estate, a small estate affidavit for a parent's modest assets, or a final tax return after someone passes are separate documents entirely, worth their own checklist rather than an afterthought bolted onto a will. A digital asset inventory, the list of accounts and logins nobody else in the family can find, belongs on that same list.
So Which One Do You Actually Need?
Sylvester, a history teacher out in Avon, emailed me the same question three times with slightly different wording, clearly hoping a rephrase would change the answer: could he fix one sentence in his will without redoing the whole packet? His situation was closer to a genuine edge case than Vance's. His original will had been drafted by an attorney years earlier, with the kind of formal amendment language a lot of lawyer-drafted documents build in, and the change he needed was a single, isolated swap of a backup executor. That's about the only scenario where a codicil earns its keep: an attorney-drafted original with room built in for amendments, one small change, and no shift to who actually inherits what.
Vance's situation called for the opposite: a DIY-drafted original, a property change that touched an actual bequest, and witnesses who needed to sign something current instead of a stack of contradictory pages. If your change touches beneficiaries, property, or an executor, or if your original will came from software rather than an attorney's template with amendment language built in, print the whole document again instead of patching it. I'm not an attorney, and nothing here replaces one for an estate with real complexity. But for a household with a house, a car, and one sibling who'll eventually get around to updating his own paperwork, redoing the interview in WillMaker beats paying for a codicil that Indiana is going to make you witness twice anyway. If you want to see the interview for yourself, you can check out WillMaker here and run the updated version side by side with your old one before you shred anything.