The will gets written on a Sunday afternoon — an online template, some careful typing, a signature at the kitchen table. It goes into the filing cabinet with a genuine sense of accomplishment, and for some families that document will work exactly as intended. For others, the problems are already baked in and will not surface for years, at which point the one person who could fix them is gone.
Let us be fair to DIY first: Colorado law does not require an attorney to make a valid will. The state recognizes properly executed self-made wills, and even handwritten (holographic) wills can qualify. If your situation is simple, your family is harmonious, and you follow the signing formalities exactly, a DIY will can be genuinely fine — and we would rather you have one than nothing.
The trouble is that 'simple' is a diagnosis most people give themselves incorrectly. This page covers what DIY wills most often get wrong, the failures that happen outside the document entirely, and an honest test for whether you can safely skip the attorney.
Where DIY wills actually fail
The failures cluster in two places, and neither is where people expect. The first is execution: Colorado has specific formalities for how a will must be signed and witnessed, and templates rarely supervise that moment. Wrong witnesses, missing signatures, a notarization used in place of what is actually required — execution defects can invalidate an otherwise thoughtful document, and nobody discovers the defect until the will is offered to the probate court.
The second is drafting blind spots. Templates handle the sunny day: spouse inherits, then the kids, everyone alive and agreeable. They stumble on the real world — a beneficiary who dies first, a blended family where 'my children' is ambiguous, an estranged child left out without the language courts look for, assets described that no longer exist. Ambiguity in a will is expensive: it gets resolved in probate, sometimes adversarially, by people who cannot ask what you meant.
- Execution defects — wrong witnesses, missed signatures — can sink a valid-looking will
- Templates rarely handle blended families, estranged relatives, or beneficiaries who die first
- Ambiguous language gets resolved by a court, not by your intentions
- A will that contradicts your beneficiary designations loses — the designations win
The failures that happen outside the will
Here is what no template tells you: much of what you own will never touch your will. Retirement accounts, life insurance, and payable-on-death accounts pass by beneficiary designation; jointly titled property passes to the surviving owner; anything in a trust follows the trust. A meticulous DIY will sitting on top of outdated designations — an ex-spouse still named on a retirement account, one child on a bank account 'for convenience' — produces an outcome nothing like the document describes. Attorneys call this the funding-and-designation layer, and it is where DIY plans fail most often and most silently.
The other outside-the-document failure is incapacity. A will does nothing while you are alive; without a financial power of attorney and medical directive, your family may need a court proceeding just to manage your affairs. Template will kits frequently leave this entire layer out.
When DIY is genuinely fine — and an honest test
DIY is defensible when all of these are true: you are single or in a stable first marriage, your beneficiaries are your spouse and adult children with no complicating needs, all your property sits in Colorado, your estate is nowhere near federal estate tax territory, and you will follow the execution formalities to the letter — and check your beneficiary designations while you are at it. Plenty of people fit that profile, and for them a careful DIY will beats years of procrastination.
If you want a structured way to run that test, the free Colorado Estate Snapshot at /estate-snapshot walks you through your assets, titling, and family situation and flags the complications that make DIY risky. And if the snapshot surfaces anything uncertain, a free Legacy Game Plan Session with Whiteford's Colorado team costs nothing and quotes a defined fee before any work begins — often less than people fear, and always less than a contested probate.
