Estate Planning Attorney in Camarillo, CA

Estate Planning in Camarillo, California: When the House Is the Estate

A lot of Camarillo was built out between the 1960s and the 1990s, and the people who bought in then, in Mission Oaks, Spanish Hills, Leisure Village, the older streets near downtown, are now the people calling me about retirement. They are not walking in with a complicated portfolio. They are walking in with one house, bought decades ago for a fraction of what it is worth today, and a property tax bill that still reflects that old purchase price rather than the current market. That gap, between what the county says the house is worth for tax purposes and what it would actually sell for, is the single most consequential number in their estate. Get the transfer right and that gap survives to the next generation. Get it wrong, through a will instead of a trust, through a child who will not actually live in the house, through a probate that runs long enough to matter, and the gap closes the day the county reassesses.

I’m Eric Ridley. I practice estate planning, trust administration, and probate law across Ventura County, including Camarillo, and this page walks through what that house-first planning problem actually involves: Proposition 19, what probate costs and how long it runs, and the documents that get the property where you actually want it to go.

What Proposition 19 actually requires

Before 2021, a parent could leave California real property to a child and the child kept the parent’s Proposition 13 assessed value no matter what the child did with the property afterward. Proposition 19 ended that blanket rule. The parent-child exclusion from reassessment now applies only if the property was the parent’s principal residence, and only if the child makes it their own principal residence too, which means moving in and filing for the homeowners’ exemption, or the disabled veterans’ exemption, on it. A rental, a second home, or land that is not the child’s own home does not qualify, full stop.

Even for a child who does move in, the exclusion is capped. What you can exclude from reassessment is your Proposition 13 factored base year value, plus an indexed amount the State Board of Equalization adjusts every two years. For transfers occurring February 16, 2025 through February 15, 2027, that indexed amount is $1,044,586. Value above your base year value plus that figure gets added to the new assessed value, even for a qualifying child. (Source: California State Board of Equalization, boe.ca.gov/news/2025/nr-25-02.htm; general program page at boe.ca.gov/prop19.)

The consequence worth saying plainly, because it is the one nobody expects until it lands on them, is this: if the child who inherits your house is not going to live in it, as a rental, a place kept for weekends, or simply the home that none of several siblings is moving into, the exclusion does not apply at all. The county reassesses to full current market value the moment the property transfers. On a house bought decades ago in Camarillo and held on a Proposition 13 basis ever since, that can mean a property tax bill several times what you have been paying, landing on your child in their very first year as owner. This is not a footnote. For an estate built around one appreciated house, it is the central decision: who is actually going to live there, and does your plan account for what happens if the honest answer is no one. See Proposition 19 planning for how that decision gets built into a trust, and the Proposition 19 reassessment calculator to see roughly what a given transfer would cost.

What happens without a trust

Without a funded trust, that house does not pass to your children on its own. It goes through probate in the Ventura County Superior Court, and probate is a percentage business. California sets statutory fees for both the attorney handling the estate and the personal representative administering it (Prob. Code §§ 10800, 10810), and both may collect the full schedule, meaning the same percentage is effectively charged twice on the same estate:

• 4% of the first $100,000
• 3% of the next $100,000
• 2% of the next $800,000
• 1% of the next $9,000,000
• 0.5% of the next $15,000,000, and a reasonable amount set by the court above that

The fee is calculated on the gross appraised value of what the estate holds, not on what you actually own after a mortgage. A house appraised at $1,300,000, with no other assets in the estate, shows it cleanly: 4% of the first $100,000 is $4,000, 3% of the next $100,000 is $3,000, 2% of the next $800,000 is $16,000, and the remaining $300,000 falls in the 1% bracket for another $3,000. That totals $26,000, and the personal representative can collect the same $26,000 again, for $52,000 in statutory fees on a single paid-off house, before extraordinary services, appraisal costs, and court filing fees are added on top (extraordinary services are separately billed and court-approved under Cal. Rules of Court, rule 7.703). None of that is negotiable once a probate is filed. It is set by statute, and it comes off the top before your family sees a dollar.

The other cost is time. My clients are told to expect twelve to eighteen months from filing to final distribution on a straightforward, uncontested estate. A house sitting in probate for that long is a house that is not moving toward anything, including whatever Proposition 19 planning a family might otherwise have been able to do with it. See probate for the full process, and the probate fee calculator to run your own numbers.

How to choose someone to handle this

If you are comparing estate planning attorneys, two questions matter more than the credentials on the wall. First, is the fee flat and in writing before you commit, or hourly and open-ended. Second, does the attorney fund the trust, meaning actually retitle your house and coordinate your accounts so the trust controls them, or hand you a signed document and call the job finished. An unfunded trust does nothing for your family. It is paper. I quote a flat fee before any work starts, and funding, deed and all, is part of the engagement rather than an upsell at the end.

What a complete plan includes

For a Camarillo homeowner, a complete plan is four documents. A revocable living trust holds the house and your other assets and controls how they pass, without probate. A pour-over will catches anything that was never retitled into the trust and names guardians for minor children, since a trust has no authority to appoint a guardian even if it holds everything else. A durable power of attorney names who manages your finances if you cannot. An advance health care directive names who makes medical decisions and states your wishes if you cannot speak for yourself. Together they cover incapacity and death. Leave any one of them out and a court fills the gap on its own schedule, not yours.

What the trust does not control

Retirement accounts, life insurance, and payable-on-death bank accounts pass by whatever beneficiary form is on file with the bank or the plan administrator, regardless of what your trust says. I see this go wrong constantly: a trust drafted correctly, years later a beneficiary form still names a prior spouse, or names one child instead of all of them, or was never filled out in the first place, which sends that account straight through probate no matter how the trust reads. If you have not checked your beneficiary designations against your trust in the last few years, that alone is worth a phone call.

Planning for the people who live in the house, or won’t

The Proposition 19 problem above is really a family problem wearing a tax law’s clothes. If you have more than one child and only one of them is going to live in the house, your plan needs to say what happens to the others: other assets balancing the inheritance, a buyout structured into the trust itself, or an agreed sale with proceeds divided among everyone. Leaving that undecided does not prevent the disagreement, it just moves the conversation from your kitchen table to a courtroom after you are gone. The same logic applies if you are blending a second marriage with children from a first marriage, or naming a guardian for young children. Those decisions benefit from being made once, deliberately, while you can still explain your reasoning, rather than improvised later by a probate judge working from a will that does not answer the question.

What this costs

My flat fee for a complete plan is $4,100 for a married couple and $3,700 for a single person, covering the trust, the pour-over will, your incapacity documents, and the deed work that actually funds the trust. Full detail is on the fees page. Whatever the number, it is a fraction of what statutory probate fees take off the top of an unplanned estate.

Book a free 30-minute call at https://ridley.click/eric-60 or call 805-244-5291. I serve Camarillo and the rest of Ventura County.

---

Related reading: Probate in California · Proposition 19 planning · Living trust · Power of attorney · Advance health care directive · Fees. Serving Ventura, Moorpark, Thousand Oaks, and all of Ventura County.

Written by Eric D. Ridley, Estate Planning & Probate Attorney, Ridley Law. Serving Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles Counties since 2010. Learn more about Eric →

This page is for general information only, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Laws and figures discussed are current as of 2026 and are subject to change. Talk to Eric directly about how they apply to your situation.