The Journal
Plain-English Estate Law
Plain-English guidance on wills, trusts, probate, and protecting your family in California.
The Trust Says Equal Shares But the Assets Can’t Be Split Evenly
Equal in value doesn’t mean identical in kind. A trustee dividing a house, a retirement account, and a coin collection three ways has to make choices, and the…
Read →The Trustee and the Only Beneficiary Are the Same Person
When one person becomes both the only trustee and the only beneficiary, the trust can collapse into outright ownership. Lawyers call it merger, and it matters because it…
Read →A Beneficiary Can’t Be Located. What Happens to Their Share?
The trustee has to look for them, document the search, and then ask the court what to do. What a trustee must not do is quietly divide the…
Read →What Happens If a Beneficiary Dies During Administration?
Their share doesn’t vanish. Where it goes depends on whether they survived the settlor, which is a different question from whether they survived long enough to be paid,…
Read →What Happens If a Beneficiary Dies Before the Settlor?
Usually their children take their place. California’s anti-lapse statute steps in automatically unless the document says otherwise, and the result is often not what the surviving family expects.…
Read →Can a Trustee Change or Remove a Beneficiary?
Almost never. A trustee administers a trust, they don’t rewrite it, and the power to change who inherits belongs to the settlor. The exceptions are narrow, they’re written…
Read →Can Beneficiaries Remove a Trustee Without Going to Court?
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on what the trust document says. California gives beneficiaries no general statutory power to fire a trustee by vote. What many trusts give…
Read →Am I Owed Interest on a Distribution the Trustee Sat On?
Only if the delay was a breach of trust. Interest isn’t automatic compensation for waiting, and that distinction is where most beneficiary complaints about slow trustees fall apart.…
Read →Want a straight read on where you stand?
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