Estate Planning in West Hills

West Hills is full of homeowners who have been in the same house for twenty, thirty, even forty years. That house is usually the biggest asset in the estate, and the quiet worry underneath a lot of estate planning conversations here is what happens to it if a parent ends up needing long-term care. That worry got more complicated on January 1, 2026. California brought back an asset test for Medi-Cal that had been eliminated only two years earlier. If someone told you in 2024 or 2025 that assets no longer matter for Medi-Cal, that advice has expired.

The Asset Test Is Back, and the Numbers Are Specific

Under AB 116 (2025) § 59, the Medi-Cal asset test returned on January 1, 2026, at $130,000 for a single applicant and $195,000 for a married couple. California had eliminated the asset test in 2024, and for about two years the rule genuinely was that savings and other countable assets did not affect Medi-Cal eligibility. That window closed at the start of this year. If you or your parent are weighing a nursing home stay or in-home care and someone is relying on 2024 or 2025 guidance that assets are irrelevant, that guidance is no longer accurate.

What counts toward that $130,000 or $195,000 figure, and what doesn’t, is not something to work out from a web page. Every household’s mix of accounts, retirement funds, and property is different. That analysis needs to happen directly, against your actual numbers, not from a general checklist.

What Medi-Cal Can Take Back, and What It Can’t Touch

The asset test determines whether you qualify for Medi-Cal while you’re alive. A separate question, and the one that worries most West Hills homeowners more, is what the state can recover afterward to reimburse itself for the cost of that care. This is where the house comes in, and it’s the single most useful point on this page.

Under SB 833 (2016), codified at Welfare and Institutions Code § 14009.5, Medi-Cal estate recovery is limited to the probate estate. Not the whole estate. Just the part that passes through probate. If your house and other major assets are held in a properly funded living trust, they do not pass through probate. They pass directly to your beneficiaries under the trust’s terms instead. That means they sit outside the reach of estate recovery entirely.

Put plainly: the asset test decides whether you qualify for benefits today. Whether the house is protected afterward is a different question, and the answer turns on probate avoidance, not on the benefits rules. A trust that holds the house solves the second problem no matter how the first one plays out.

If There’s No Trust, Probate Prices the House at Full Value

Skip the trust and the house lands in probate, where California prices the estate by statute rather than by negotiation. Under Probate Code § 10810, the attorney handling the estate is entitled to a fee set by a sliding scale: 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, and 0.5% of the next $15,000,000, with anything above $25,000,000 set by the court. Under Probate Code § 10800, the personal representative, usually a family member, is entitled to the identical fee. Both can be charged. It isn’t one fee split two ways. It’s the same schedule paid twice.

The part that surprises people is that this schedule runs on the gross value of the estate, not the equity. A house appraised at $1,000,000 with a $700,000 mortgage still counts as $1,000,000 for this purpose. On a $1,000,000 estate, the statutory fee works out to $4,000 plus $3,000 plus $16,000, or $23,000, for the attorney, and another $23,000 for the personal representative. That’s $46,000 in statutory fees alone, before any extraordinary services the court approves separately under California Rules of Court, rule 7.703, on a house a lot of West Hills families own free and clear or close to it. None of that fee shrinks because there’s a mortgage. It’s calculated on what the house is worth, full stop.

Proposition 19 and What Your Kids Actually Inherit

Assume the house passes to your children cleanly, whether through a trust or after probate. Proposition 19 then governs whether they keep your property tax basis or get reassessed at current market value. To qualify for the parent-child exclusion, the home has to be the parent’s principal residence, and the child has to move in and make it their own principal residence, filing for the homeowners’ exemption. There’s also a dollar limit built into the exclusion: it covers the factored base year value plus an indexed amount, currently $1,044,586 for transfers occurring between February 16, 2025 and February 15, 2027, according to the California State Board of Equalization. Value above that limit gets added onto the new assessed value.

The surprise that catches families off guard is what happens when a child doesn’t move in. A house kept as a rental, or as a second home, doesn’t qualify for the exclusion. It gets reassessed at full market value, and the property tax bill can jump substantially the year after death. If more than one of your children stands to inherit the house, deciding now who moves in, or whether the house sells instead, changes those numbers considerably. That decision is easier to make calmly in advance than it is to sort out among siblings after a parent has passed.

None of This Works Without Capacity

Every document discussed here, the trust, the deed transferring the house into it, the beneficiary designations, requires the person signing to have the legal capacity to understand what they’re signing. Long-term care needs and cognitive decline often arrive together, which means the plan that would have protected the house has to get signed before capacity becomes a question, not after.

That means a durable power of attorney for finances, so someone you trust can step in and manage accounts and property the moment you can’t, and an advance health care directive, so your medical wishes are on record and someone you’ve named can speak for you. Waiting until a diagnosis or a hospital stay forces the issue is the single most common way a family in West Hills ends up in a courtroom asking a judge for a conservatorship, instead of simply using a document that was already signed. A conservatorship is public, it’s supervised by the court on an ongoing basis, and it costs far more in time and legal fees than signing a power of attorney ever would have. Once capacity is genuinely in question, it is usually too late to fix that with paperwork.

West Hills Long-Term Care and Estate Planning FAQs

Will Medi-Cal take our house if a parent needs nursing home care?

Not automatically, and not while your parent is alive. The asset test decides eligibility going forward. What happens to the house afterward depends on whether it passes through probate. A house held in a funded living trust bypasses probate and sits outside Medi-Cal’s estate recovery under Welfare and Institutions Code § 14009.5.

We were told in 2025 that assets don’t matter for Medi-Cal anymore. Is that still true?

No. That was accurate for a roughly two-year window after California eliminated the asset test. AB 116 (2025) § 59 brought it back, effective January 1, 2026, at $130,000 for one person and $195,000 for a couple. Advice from 2024 or 2025 saying assets are irrelevant is out of date.

Does a trust protect the house from the cost of care itself, or just from estate recovery afterward?

A trust addresses estate recovery: the state’s ability to recoup costs after death, by keeping the house out of probate. It doesn’t, by itself, change whether the assets inside that trust count toward Medi-Cal’s asset test while you’re alive. Those are two different questions, and both deserve a direct conversation about your specific accounts and property.

Which county handles probate for a West Hills estate?

West Hills is part of the City of Los Angeles, so an estate here goes through the Los Angeles County Superior Court. A funded living trust keeps you out of that court entirely.

My parent already has significant savings and needs care soon. Where do we even start?

That’s exactly the situation where the asset test and estate recovery rules intersect, and where general information stops being useful. What counts, what doesn’t, and what to do about the house needs to be worked out directly, against your family’s actual numbers, not from a checklist on a page like this one.

Related

See also Probate, Fees, Living Trusts, Prop 19 Planning, Power of Attorney for Parents, Medi-Cal Estate Recovery After AB 116, Woodland Hills, and Calabasas.

Want to weigh your options first? This comparison of estate planning attorneys in West Hills lists credentials and State Bar numbers, so you can look up anyone before you commit to a first call.

---

West Hills is Los Angeles County, so the probate court, the recorder, and the Proposition 13 rules all follow LA County procedure. 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 →