Did you know you can complete your estate planning in under an hour for less than $200? Thanks to a number of online will making tools, creating a will has never been easier. In a quest to discover the best quality will making tool on the market, I created 13 wills and had them evaluated by an estate planning expert to determine which produced the best product (read the full reviews here).
The will making tools I reviewed fell into two categories: paid and unpaid. In my experience, I found that even the “free” wills came with some strings attached. The free platforms tried to upsell you to recurring membership charges, tried to sell you life insurance, or tried to sell your data. If you’d rather avoid the hard sell, it’s worth upgrading to a paid will making tool.
Of all the paid tools I reviewed, three stuck out from the crowd:
Trust & Will
Trust & Will feels like a good friend is trying to help you put together your estate plan. The site is beautifully designed and easy to navigate. Trust & Will has support standing by, both in the form of a chatbot and real attorneys who are on standby to answer your questions as you complete your documents. Once finished, they will mail you a hard copy of your documents (in addition to your PDF download) for no additional cost. The documents themselves are detailed and thorough.
Cost: Trust & Will offers three tiers: $39 to name guardians for your kids; $89 for a will; $399 to create a trust
Time to Complete: 15 minutes for just the will, 30 minutes total for living will and financial power of attorney
Overall Score: 17/20
User Friendliness Rating (1-10): 10
Attorney’s Will Quality Rating (1-10): 7
Pros:
- Strong support options with chatbot and lawyers available to answer questions
- Easy to navigate
- Beautiful design
Cons:
- The end result was more boilerplate than other wills we reviewed.
- You can get charged $12/year if you forget to cancel the recurring subscription.
- It did feel like I was being upsold to try and buy a trust package a couple times.
Total Legal Wills
If you need to create a will quickly, Total Legal is a great solution. While the site doesn’t have the best user experience, the end product documents more than make up for it. Estate planning expert and attorney, Andy Joyce, reviewed our Total Legal will and was impressed with how comprehensive and clean the end document was.
Joyce stated, “Total Legal’s will was one of the best wills I read of the bunch, and included topics not found in other estate planning tools, like including pets and your wishes for debts in your will.”
Cost: $19.95 for each document (last will and testament, power of attorney and living will, though you get a $5 discount on any subsequent documents after completing your will.)
Time to Complete: 10 minutes per document (30 minutes in total)
Overall Score: 16/20
User Friendliness Rating (1-10): 6
Attorney’s Will Quality Rating (1-10): 10
Pros:
- Went more in-depth than other tools.
- Included pats, debt wishes and burial instructions in the estate planning process.
- Fast and easy.
- Easy to update.
- One of the top two final documents attorney Andy Joyce reviewed. End product was very “clean and ready to go.”
Cons:
- Some of the concepts in the questionnaire were a little confusing.
- The site itself looks a bit dated.
- A la carte pricing model.
- Outdated user experience.
US Legal Wills
US Legal has been around for more than 20 years and has helped thousands create their estate planning documents. That experience shows. While the site is less user friendly than some of its competitors, the end documents were very clean and detailed.
Cost: $39.95 for last will and testament; $29.95 for power of attorney; $19.95 for living will; mirror will for spouse is $23.97
Time to Complete: 20 minutes
Overall Score: 14
User Friendliness Rating (1-10): 6
Attorney’s Will Quality Rating (1-10): 8
Pros:
- The platform has common questions and helpful guidance on the left of the screen as you’re completing your will.
- There is a relatively inexpensive option to have a lawyer review your doc.
- Very thorough discovery process in the tool resulted in a more specific and detailed end result.
Cons:
- Questions got a lot more detailed than others, which could be overwhelming at times.
- Not a bundled option; only a la carte paid plan.
- Outdated interface.
