Why I Am An Estate Planning Attorney?

Yes, and not being wealthy is part of the reason. Estate planning isn't about dodging a tax. For most California families it's about keeping a house and some savings out of probate, naming who makes your medical and money decisions if you can't, and saying who raises your kids. If you own a home in California, you almost certainly need a trust to keep your family out of probate court, whatever your net worth.

You can, and the documents are often fine on paper. The problem is what happens after. Most DIY plans are never funded, meaning the house and accounts are never retitled into the trust, so the trust sits empty and the estate goes through probate anyway. A plan is only worth anything if it works when it's needed, and that's the part the forms don't do for you.

Your estate plan only helps if it exists before you need it, and you don't get to pick when that is. Waiting costs nothing right up until the day it costs everything: a sudden death or a stroke with no documents in place leaves your family in court, making decisions you never got to weigh in on. If the only reason you're waiting is that it's an unpleasant thing to think about, that's the part to push through.

Most plans have four pieces. A revocable living trust, which holds your assets and keeps them out of probate. A backup will, sometimes called a pour-over will, that catches anything left outside the trust and names guardians for minor children. A durable power of attorney, so someone you choose can handle your finances if you can't. And an advance health care directive, so someone can make medical decisions and your wishes are on record.

A will doesn't avoid probate. A trust does. A will is really just instructions to the probate court, so an estate with only a will still goes through the same public, months-to-years process. Assets held in a living trust pass to your family without probate, stay private, and keep working if you become incapacitated, which a will can't do, because a will only takes effect when you die.

A trust is a legal arrangement that holds your assets under a set of instructions you control. With a revocable living trust, you run it yourself while you're alive and well, so nothing about your day-to-day changes. You name who takes over if you can't manage things, and who inherits when you're gone. Because the trust owns the assets, they don't have to pass through probate.

Three, mainly. It keeps your estate out of probate, which saves your family the cost and the year-or-more delay. It keeps your affairs private, because a trust isn't filed with the court the way a probated will is. And it covers incapacity, so if you can't manage your own finances, the person you chose steps in without a court guardianship. One honest caveat: a revocable living trust does not lower your income or estate taxes, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something.

The state's intestacy rules decide who inherits, not you. In general, your community property goes to your surviving spouse, and your separate property is split between your spouse and your children by a fixed formula. People the law doesn't recognize get nothing: an unmarried partner, stepchildren you never adopted, a friend or a charity you wanted to include. And it all runs through probate.

Probate is the court process that transfers your property after you die when there's no trust holding it. In California it's public, it usually takes a year to two, and the fees are set by statute based on the size of the estate, not the work involved. On a one-million-dollar estate, the statutory fee runs about $23,000 for the attorney and the same again for the executor, before court and appraisal costs. [verify current statutory schedule, Prob. Code § 10810, before publishing] A living trust is how most people avoid the whole thing.

At a high level: decide what the plan needs to do, draft the trust and the supporting documents, sign them with the formalities California requires, then fund the trust by retitling your house and accounts into it. That last step is the one people skip, and it's the one that matters, because an unfunded trust doesn't avoid anything. Most people work with an attorney for exactly that reason, to make sure the funding actually gets done.