Estate Planning in Encino

Estate Planning Attorney in Encino, California

Encino is one of the more established communities in the San Fernando Valley, and a good share of the families I work with here are on a second marriage or raising kids from more than one relationship under the same roof. A long-held home plus a family structure that is not one marriage with shared children is exactly where a generic estate plan does the most damage. “Everything to my spouse, and they will take care of the kids” sounds fair. It is also the plan most likely to leave your own children with nothing.

I’m Eric Ridley, an estate planning attorney at Ridley Law. I work with Encino families by phone and video, with a signing visit in person, on flat-fee plans built for exactly this situation. Call 805-244-5291 or book a no-cost 30-minute call at https://ridley.click/eric-60.

The plan that quietly disinherits your own children

Most second-marriage couples I meet have a will or trust leaving everything outright to whichever spouse survives, on the assumption the survivor will later divide it fairly among all the children, including stepchildren. Nothing in the law requires that. Once an estate belongs to the surviving spouse outright, it is theirs to leave however they choose. They can rewrite their own plan, remarry, or favor their own children, and the first spouse’s children can end up with nothing. That is not a rare outcome. It is the default result of an “everything to my spouse” plan in a blended family, and it happens quietly, years later, when nobody is left to object.

A structure that provides for your spouse without cutting out your kids

The honest fix is not choosing between your spouse and your children. It is a trust that does both jobs: it gives your surviving spouse real support, use of the home, income, and access to principal if needed, for the rest of their life, while locking in that whatever is left when your spouse dies goes to the children you named, not whoever your spouse later decides to favor. The mechanism is to divide what you leave behind into a share your spouse can draw on and a share held for your children, so your spouse benefits during their lifetime but cannot redirect the remainder through a new will, a new trust, or a new marriage. Under California’s community property system, each spouse generally controls the disposition of their own one-half interest in community property, while separate property brought into the marriage or received individually by gift or inheritance is that spouse’s own to direct. Sorting out which assets are whose to begin with is the first step in building this kind of plan correctly.

Worth saying plainly: this structure is rarely about federal estate tax. With the exemption at $15,000,000 per person, made permanent under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, most Encino estates owe no federal estate tax regardless of the trust structure. The reason to build a trust like this is control over who ultimately inherits, not tax avoidance.

Why the trustee choice is its own source of conflict

In a blended family, deciding who manages the trust after the first spouse dies is often more contentious than deciding who inherits what. Name the surviving spouse as sole trustee, and they control decisions over a remainder meant for children who are not theirs. Name a child from the first marriage, and that child is now deciding their own stepparent’s support, often inside a strained relationship. No arrangement removes all friction, but the choice deserves to be made on purpose: a neutral professional or corporate trustee, a co-trustee pairing the spouse with a child, or distribution terms specific enough that the trustee follows a formula instead of exercising judgment that puts family members at odds.

The beneficiary form that undoes the whole plan

Retirement accounts and life insurance do not pass through your trust or your will, no matter how carefully either is drafted. They pass directly to whoever is named on the beneficiary designation form on file with the custodian or insurer. In a blended family, this is the most common way a well-built plan fails silently: an ex-spouse still listed as primary beneficiary on a 401(k), an IRA, or a life insurance policy years after the divorce and remarriage, quietly overriding every instruction in the trust. Nobody catches it because nobody rechecks the forms after the plan is signed. Reviewing and coordinating every designation against the trust is part of how I build a plan, not homework left for the client.

Probate in the Encino area, and what it costs even with a plan half finished

Encino is part of the City of Los Angeles, so probate here goes through the Los Angeles County Superior Court, a public proceeding the firm’s own experience puts at twelve to eighteen months. California sets the statutory fee for the attorney (Prob. Code § 10810) and the personal representative (§ 10800) on the same schedule, and both may take it, so it is effectively charged twice on one 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 above $25,000,000 a reasonable amount set by the court.

The detail that surprises people is that this fee is calculated on the gross appraised value of the estate, not the equity you actually hold. A $1,000,000 home with a $700,000 mortgage against it is still counted at the full $1,000,000. On a straightforward $1,000,000 estate, the statutory math is 4% of $100,000 ($4,000), plus 3% of $100,000 ($3,000), plus 2% of $800,000 ($16,000), for a total of $23,000 to the attorney, and the same $23,000 again to the personal representative: $46,000 combined, before any extraordinary fees approved under rule 7.703 of the California Rules of Court. In a blended family, that delay lands directly on top of the tension already built into the plan, since a surviving spouse who needs support and children waiting on a remainder are both stuck behind a year-plus proceeding neither of them chose.

Proposition 19 and the house that has to serve two generations

Proposition 19 narrowed the old parent-child exclusion. To keep your property-tax basis, the home has to be your principal residence, and the child inheriting it has to move in and make it their own principal residence, filing for the homeowners’ or disabled veterans’ exemption. The exclusion is not unlimited even then: the protected value is your factored base year value plus an indexed amount, currently $1,044,586 for transfers between February 16, 2025 and February 15, 2027, up 2.15% from the prior $1,022,600 and adjusted every two years by the State Board of Equalization. Anything above that limit is added to the new assessed value, and a home that becomes a rental or a second residence instead of the child’s actual home gets reassessed at current market value. That is the biggest change from the old rules and the surprise families run into most often.

In a blended family plan where your spouse has lifetime use of the house and your children receive it afterward, the Prop 19 transfer happens later, at your spouse’s death, and it is your child who then has to decide whether moving in is realistic. That is worth mapping out while the plan is built, not left for whichever child is standing there when your spouse dies.

Funding the trust and the incapacity documents behind it

None of this works if the trust is never funded. A trust only controls what is titled in its name, so the home deed, brokerage and bank accounts, and any business interest have to be retitled while you are alive to sign the paperwork. I handle that funding as part of the engagement, not as homework. Alongside the trust, a pour-over will catches anything left out, and a durable power of attorney for finances and an advance health care directive name who can act for you if you become incapacitated before you die. In a blended family, incapacity decisions can be just as contentious as the inheritance itself, particularly where a spouse and adult children from an earlier marriage see a parent’s care differently, so naming that authority clearly matters as much as the trust does.

Questions Encino families in blended households ask most

My spouse and I each have kids from a prior marriage. Do we need one trust or two? Either can work. Some couples use one joint trust that splits into separate shares at the first death, one for the survivor and one preserved for each side’s children. Others keep separate trusts from the start. The right answer depends on how your assets are titled and how separate you want each side’s inheritance to stay.

If my spouse remarries after I’m gone, can that new spouse end up with what I meant for my kids? Not if your trust preserves a remainder for your children rather than leaving everything to your spouse outright. That is the point of splitting the trust into a survivor’s share and a children’s share instead of one unrestricted gift.

Can my children contest the trust if my spouse is also the trustee? They can raise an objection, which is why the trustee choice and distribution terms need to be specific enough to limit disputes before they start, whether that means a co-trustee, a neutral trustee, or clear formulas rather than open discretion.

Related

See also probate, fees, living trusts, wills, Prop 19 planning, and the estate planning pages for Woodland Hills, Tarzana, and Calabasas. For the exact dollar figures on your own estate, use the California probate fee calculator.

Choosing the right trustee and the right attorney matters just as much in a blended family. This list of estate planning attorneys in Encino lists credentials and State Bar numbers so you can check out anyone you are considering, including me.

A blended family should not have to choose between taking care of a spouse and protecting your children’s inheritance. It needs a plan built to do both, on purpose, with the trustee, the beneficiary forms, and the funding handled correctly the first time. Call 805-244-5291 or book at https://ridley.click/eric-60 to get started.

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Encino property is Los Angeles County property, and for homes inside the City of Los Angeles the city transfer tax rules apply too. Funding your trust does not trigger them. See living trust attorney in Los Angeles.

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