Will & Trust Benefits 2026 now!

Short answer: A revocable living trust and a pour-over will work together, not as substitutes for each other. The trust holds and distributes whatever you actually transfer into it, avoiding probate for those assets. The pour-over will is the backup: it catches anything still titled in your name alone at death and directs it into the trust, but that leftover property still goes through probate if it exceeds California’s small estate threshold of $208,850 (Probate Code § 13100). Pairing the two closes a gap a trust alone leaves wide open.

Why do I need both a will and a trust?

A funded revocable living trust is the tool that actually avoids probate in California. Assets you retitle into the trust, your house, bank accounts, investment accounts, pass to your beneficiaries under the trust’s terms without court involvement. A will does not avoid probate. It only takes effect once a court validates it through the probate process. On its own, a will guarantees a public, court-supervised administration for everything it covers, no matter how carefully it is written.

What does the pour-over will actually do?

A pour-over will is not a competing document. It is a narrow backstop that says: anything titled in my name alone at death, and not already in my trust, gets poured into the trust and administered under its terms. Without one, forgotten or newly acquired assets, a car bought the month before death, an inheritance received and never retitled, would pass under California’s intestate succession rules instead of the plan you built (Probate Code § 6400). The pour-over will also names an executor and, for parents of minor children, nominates a guardian. A trust document does neither of those things.

What happens to assets the trust never received?

This is where the combination earns its keep, and where do-it-yourself plans usually fail. A living trust that is never funded, meaning the deed, account titles, and beneficiary designations were never actually changed to name the trust, does nothing for those assets at death. They fall to the pour-over will instead, and the pour-over will still has to go through probate if the leftover assets exceed $208,850 in gross value, for deaths on or after April 1, 2025, with the threshold adjusting again on April 1, 2028 (Probate Code § 13100).

Does the combination still matter for a modest estate?

Yes. Probate is a public, court-supervised process regardless of estate size, while a properly funded trust keeps administration private and generally out of court. That difference matters even when the dollar amounts are modest, because the estate does not need to be large to trigger a public filing, a waiting period, and the statutory fee schedule described below. Assets held in joint tenancy, payable-on-death accounts, transfer-on-death accounts, and accounts or policies with a named beneficiary generally pass outside probate on their own, which is part of why an inventory of what you actually own matters as much as the documents themselves. A trust and a pour-over will are how everything else, the assets that do not already have a built-in beneficiary designation, gets the same outside-of-probate treatment.

What does probate cost when funding gets missed?

California sets probate compensation by statute, not negotiation. The executor is entitled to 4 percent of the first $100,000, 3 percent of the next $100,000, 2 percent of the next $800,000, and lower percentages on higher amounts (Probate Code § 10800). The estate’s attorney is entitled to an identical fee, calculated separately on the same schedule (Probate Code § 10810). On a $1,000,000 estate, that produces $23,000 for the executor and another $23,000 for the attorney, $46,000 in ordinary statutory fees before court costs or bond, and the fee is calculated on the gross value of the estate without any reduction for a mortgage (Probate Code § 10800(b)). That is the cost of relying on a will by itself, or of a trust that got signed but never funded.

What does a complete plan cost?

A complete trust-based plan at Ridley Law is built as one package rather than sold piecemeal: a revocable living trust, the pour-over will that backs it up, incapacity documents, and the deed work to move your California home into the trust so funding does not get skipped. The flat fee is $4,100 for a married couple and $3,700 for a single person. The trustee you name is paid according to whatever your trust document specifies, or, if the trust is silent, a reasonable amount under the circumstances. There is no statutory percentage schedule for trust administration the way there is for probate (Probate Code §§ 15680 and 15681).

Figures verified July 2026.

What to do next

If you already have a trust, confirm your house, accounts, and other titled assets are actually retitled in the trust’s name, not just mentioned in it. If you only have a will, or nothing at all, talk to an estate planning attorney about whether a funded trust with a pour-over will makes sense for your assets and your family. The gap between a plan that was signed and a plan that was funded is exactly what shows up in probate court.