The Estate Plan Review Scorecard

What’s inside the guide

• A ten-question scorecard you can complete in about ten minutes, built around the areas most likely to have drifted since your plan was signed.
• A plain framework for grading whether your existing trust, will, and related documents still match your family and your finances today.
• Guidance on reading your own score and deciding whether the plan needs a small update, a rewrite, or nothing at all.
• An explanation of why documents that were correct the day you signed them can quietly stop working years later, even though nothing on the page changed.
• A clear read on who benefits most from running the scorecard: anyone whose plan is more than five years old.

How often should I review my estate plan?

There is no single deadline that forces a review, but several of the numbers built into a typical California plan change on a fixed schedule whether you touch the plan or not. California’s small estate affidavit threshold under Probate Code § 13100 adjusts every three years, and the Proposition 19 parent-child property tax exclusion cap under Revenue and Taxation Code § 63.2 adjusts every two years. A plan that was accurate the day you signed it can fall out of step with current law within a few years without anyone doing anything wrong.

Does an old trust automatically keep my family out of probate?

A revocable living trust only keeps an asset out of probate if that asset was actually retitled into the trust’s name, a step often called funding. Buy a new account, refinance, or acquire property after the trust was signed and never retitle it, and that asset can still end up in probate even though a trust exists. A plan review checks funding as closely as it checks the document language.

Has the federal estate tax exemption changed enough to matter to my plan?

For 2026, the federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15,000,000 per person, or $30,000,000 for a married couple, set under IRC section 2010(c) by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. If your trust was drafted when the exemption was far lower, it may still carry tax-driven provisions, such as a mandatory split at the first spouse’s death, built for a number that no longer applies to most families. A review checks whether those provisions still make sense or now just add cost and complexity.

If the scorecard turns up questions about your own documents, a trust health check looks at the actual paperwork, not just the ten questions.