Estate Planning Attorney in Simi Valley, CA

Estate Planning in Simi Valley

Most of the people I meet in Simi Valley tell me some version of the same thing: “We’re not really estate planning people. We don’t have an estate.” Then I ask what they own: a house bought decades ago that has appreciated well past what they paid, a 401(k) from years at the same job, a car, some savings. That is an estate. It is exactly the kind that ends up in probate, because the person who owns it never thought the word applied to them.

I am Eric Ridley, an estate planning attorney serving Simi Valley and the rest of Ventura County. Most of my clients are first-time planners: working households and retirees who have never signed a will or a trust and are not sure they need to. This page is for that decision, made plainly.

What happens if you never get around to it

If you die without a will or trust in California, you do not get to decide who inherits. The state does, through a formula called intestate succession. For a married person whose children are all from that marriage, the formula often lands close to what people would have wanted anyway. It lands badly for situations it was never built for: a second marriage with kids from a first marriage, an unmarried couple who never got around to a wedding, or a homeowner whose closest living relative is a sibling they have not spoken to in years. The formula does not know what you wanted, only who is related to you and how.

Two other things happen automatically when there is no plan. If you have minor children and both parents are gone, a judge decides who raises them, guided by whatever the court can piece together rather than your own written wishes. And if you become incapacitated before you die, whether from a stroke, an accident, or dementia, your family cannot simply step in. They typically need a conservatorship, a court proceeding, to get that authority. All of this is avoidable with a handful of documents signed while you are healthy enough to sign them.

The twelve to eighteen months, and what it costs

When there is no funded trust, an estate with real property in it goes through probate at the Ventura County Superior Court in Ventura. In my practice, I tell clients to plan on twelve to eighteen months from filing to final distribution, my own working figure, and it is roughly consistent with the California Courts’ self-help materials, which describe a typical timeline of about nine months to a year and a half. Either way, nobody inherits quickly.

The cost is the part that surprises people most. California law sets statutory fees for the estate’s attorney and the personal representative as a percentage of the gross value of the estate, not your equity. A Simi Valley home with a small mortgage still gets counted at full market value for that calculation, so on a home that has appreciated the way many have here, the statutory fees alone can run into the tens of thousands, paid out before your family sees anything. A small estate affidavit lets very modest estates skip formal probate under a threshold updated in AB 2016, but once a house is counted at current value, most homeowners are past it. None of this is a scare tactic. It is what the probate process actually is: public, slow, and priced by statute rather than by the work involved. A funded revocable living trust routes assets to your family without any of it.

Will versus trust: when a will alone genuinely covers it

I will not tell every client they need a trust, because it is not always true. If you rent rather than own, have no minor children, and your assets are mostly a bank account and a retirement account with beneficiaries named correctly, a well-drafted will paired with correct beneficiary designations can genuinely be enough. The will still has to exist; dying with neither a will nor a trust is what triggers the intestacy formula above.

Where a will alone stops being enough is real property. Any real estate titled in your individual name has to pass through probate under a will, because a will only takes effect through the probate court. That single fact is why most Simi Valley homeowners need a living trust rather than a will alone: the home is usually the asset that makes probate expensive, and the trust is the only document that keeps it out of court entirely.

The step almost everyone skips

Signing a trust and funding a trust are two different things, and the gap between them is the most common planning failure I see, including in families who paid for a trust years ago and assume they are covered. A trust only controls what is actually titled in its name. If your house is still deeded to you personally and your accounts are never retitled, the trust document sitting in a drawer does nothing when you die; the estate still goes through probate, as if you had never signed anything. Funding means retitling the house into the trust, redirecting accounts, and confirming beneficiary forms line up with the plan. I walk every client through that step and confirm it is done, because a signed but unfunded trust is worse than no trust at all: the appearance of protection with none of the substance.

A funded trust has a second, quieter benefit if long-term care is a realistic concern for you or a parent. Medi-Cal’s estate recovery reaches only the probate estate, so assets in a properly funded trust sit outside its reach after death, while the same assets in your individual name do not. That rule is codified at Welfare & Institutions Code § 14009.5. Funding is not a paperwork technicality. It is what makes every other benefit of the trust real.

The two documents you need while you are still here

A trust and a will only matter after you die. Two other documents matter while you are alive and unable to speak for yourself: a durable power of attorney, which names someone to handle your finances and property, and an advance health care directive, which names someone to make medical decisions and states your wishes about treatment. Without them, your spouse or adult child cannot simply step in during an incapacitating illness or injury. They have to petition a court for conservatorship, public and slow, exactly what good planning avoids. Both documents cost far less to prepare than a conservatorship costs to obtain, and both only work if signed before they are needed.

If there are minor children in the house

Parents of minor children carry a piece of this that childless clients do not: a guardianship nomination, usually a short section within the will naming who raises your children if both parents are gone before they turn eighteen. Without it, a judge decides, based on whatever family members come forward, which is not the same as knowing what you would have chosen. A nomination does not guarantee the court’s outcome, but it tells the judge exactly what you wanted, and in practice that carries real weight.

The forms that override your will without telling you

Retirement accounts, life insurance, and payable-on-death bank accounts do not pass under your will or trust. They pass to whoever is named on the beneficiary form on file with the custodian, regardless of what your will says. I regularly find an ex-spouse still listed on a 401(k) from a job left fifteen years ago, or a form left blank entirely, which sends the account through probate by default. Reviewing these forms takes an afternoon. Leaving them unreviewed can undo an otherwise well-built plan without anyone noticing until it is too late to fix.

What this actually costs

I charge flat fees, agreed before we start, not by the hour, and the current numbers are posted on my fees page rather than hidden behind a “contact us” form. That is the honest way to answer a question a lot of estate planning sites dodge. The number worth holding next to that fee is not zero. It is the cost of probate on your home at full value, not your equity, plus twelve to eighteen months of your family waiting on a court calendar. Against that, a complete plan costs a fraction of what doing nothing costs, once, on your terms, instead of being deducted from what your family receives.

When your situation is not quite so basic

Most first-time planners need only the core documents above, actually funded. A few situations call for more. An estate that has grown well past your original assumptions through decades of appreciation and retirement savings belongs on the high-net-worth estate planning page. Federal estate tax only applies above $15,000,000 per person under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, so most families never touch it, but the planning questions change well before that number. A contracting business, rental properties, or real liability exposure calls for asset protection. A family member on SSI, Medi-Cal, or other means-tested benefits needs a special needs trust built before any inheritance arrives, not after. A business you built yourself needs succession planning, because a business with no plan tends to lose most of its value in the year after the owner is gone.

If none of those apply to you, that is not a reason to put this off. It is the reason the core plan is usually straightforward. Book a no-cost 30-minute call at https://ridley.click/eric-60 or call 805-244-5291. I serve Simi Valley and all of Ventura County, by video, by phone, and in person.