Free Estate Planning Consultation – What to Ask | Ridley Law

Short answer: A free estate planning consultation should answer one question: what actually happens to your family, your home, and your children if you die or become incapacitated today, under the plan you have right now, not the one you assume you have. A useful meeting reviews whether your estate would face probate, whether your assets are titled the way your documents assume, who has authority if you cannot act for yourself, and who would raise your minor children. If the conversation is mostly about price before anyone asks those questions, you have not gotten what you came for.

Will my estate face probate under my current plan?

Ask this first. California requires formal probate for an estate with assets subject to probate totaling more than $208,850, for deaths on or after April 1, 2025 (Probate Code § 13100). Add up your home equity, accounts not held jointly or payable to a named beneficiary, and anything else in your own name. If the total is over that line and nothing routes around probate, your family is headed to court.

A will by itself does not avoid probate. It only takes effect once a court validates it through the probate process. Only a properly funded revocable living trust moves assets to your beneficiaries outside of probate.

Probate is not cheap. On a $1,000,000 estate, California’s statutory fee schedule produces $23,000 for the executor and a separate $23,000 for the estate’s attorney, about $46,000 in ordinary fees before court costs or bond (Probate Code §§ 10800 and 10810). A consultation should tell you whether your plan is built to avoid that bill or whether your family is walking into it. If probate exposure is unclear, ask to see the math on how California probate actually works.

Is your property actually titled the way your plan assumes?

This is where plans quietly fail. A trust that was signed but never funded, meaning your house, accounts, and other property were never retitled into it, leaves your family with the same probate exposure as having no trust at all. Signing the trust document is not the finish line. Retitling the assets is.

Assets held in joint tenancy, payable-on-death or transfer-on-death accounts, and life insurance or retirement accounts with a named beneficiary generally pass outside of probate on their own, regardless of what your trust or will says. A consultation should go through your real property, bank and brokerage accounts, business interests, life insurance, and retirement assets one by one and confirm which ones are actually covered and which ones are not.

Even families who already have a trust should not assume they are protected. An old trust, an unfunded trust, or a trust drafted before a marriage, a divorce, a new child, or a property purchase can create false confidence, and false confidence delays action until the gap becomes a crisis.

Who has authority if you cannot act for yourself before you die?

Death planning gets the attention. Incapacity planning is just as urgent and gets skipped just as often. If a stroke, an accident, or a serious illness leaves you unable to manage your finances or make medical decisions, someone has to be legally authorized to step in. A power of attorney and a health care directive are the documents that give that authority directly, without a court proceeding. Without them, your family may have to ask a court for conservatorship authority instead, which is a public process that takes time your family may not have.

Ask specifically who you have named, whether that person actually knows they are named, and whether the documents are current. A consultation should walk through this as carefully as the death-side planning, not treat it as an afterthought. For more on how this authority works, see powers of attorney.

Who raises your children if something happens to you?

If you have minor children, this is not optional. A court does not know who you trust, who your child feels safe with, or who would raise them the way you would want. Without a clear guardian nomination, that decision falls to a judge working from limited information, and the person you would never choose may still end up in the conversation. A consultation should ask who you have in mind, whether that person is willing and able, and whether you have named a backup if your first choice cannot serve.

What should make you question a free consultation?

Not every free consultation delivers real value. Some are sales scripts. Be cautious if the meeting focuses on price before anyone asks about your assets, your children, or your family structure. Be cautious if nobody asks how your property is titled. Be cautious if the recommended plan sounds identical for every family regardless of circumstances, because a second marriage, a child with special needs, uneven asset ownership among children, or rental property all change what a sound plan looks like.

A consultation is also free of legal obligation on both sides. Meeting with an attorney does not, by itself, create an attorney-client relationship, and a straight answer about what is wrong with your current plan costs you nothing to hear.

Figures verified July 2026.

What to do next

Pull together what you have now, even if it is nothing, and get specific answers on probate exposure, asset titling, incapacity authority, and guardianship before deciding what needs to change. If your plan is old, unfunded, or built from a generic template, treat that as the warning sign it is and talk to an estate planning attorney about what your family actually needs.