Estate Planning for Unmarried Couples
For Committed Couples Who Aren'T Married · Free PDF Guide
California's inheritance rules only recognize spouses and blood relatives. If you're not married, the law treats your partner like a stranger, no matter how long you've been together. This guide is how you fix that with paperwork instead of a marriage license.
A quick, plain-English read. No legalese, and nothing to buy.
From Ridley Law · Eric Ridley · Estate planning, trust administration, and probate
California law treats unmarried partners as legal strangers. The checkup shows you what to put in place now.
What’s inside the guide
- How California’s intestate succession laws treat a partner you never married
- Which documents let you name your partner as beneficiary, agent, and decision-maker
- What a will alone does for an unmarried couple, and where it falls short
- How a funded revocable living trust can direct assets to a partner outside of probate
- How property titling affects what your partner actually receives
- The gap between a verbal understanding and something a court will enforce
Does my partner inherit anything if I die without a will in California?
Under California’s intestate succession statutes, an unmarried partner generally inherits nothing. Those statutes, not your personal wishes, decide who gets your property when there is no will or trust, and they hand the estate to a fixed line of blood relatives and spouses. Prob. Code §6400 establishes that the intestacy rules control, and Prob. Code §§6401-6402 lay out the order of inheritance, which does not include an unmarried partner or an unadopted stepchild at any point.
Can a living trust give my partner the protection marriage would?
A trust document controls who receives your property, and it does not care whether you are married. A properly funded revocable living trust passes assets directly to the people you name, including an unmarried partner, without going through the public, court-supervised probate process. The key word is “funded”: a trust only controls the assets actually retitled into it.
What happens to a house we own together if we’re not married?
How the house is titled matters more than the relationship status of the owners. Property held in joint tenancy generally passes to the surviving co-owner outside of probate regardless of marital status, while property held in one partner’s name alone follows whatever plan, or lack of one, that partner has in place. Getting the title and the estate plan to match is part of what protects a surviving partner.
For the documents that put this into place, see https://ridleylawoffices.com/living-trust-attorney/.
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