Estate Plan Review: Secure Your Legacy

Short answer: Review your estate plan after every major life event, a marriage, a divorce, a new child, a death in the family, a home purchase, and again whenever a relevant law resets, since figures like California’s property tax exclusion cap and the federal estate tax exemption change on a fixed schedule. An estate plan signed five years ago is often running on numbers and assumptions that no longer apply.

Why does an estate plan need regular attention?

An estate plan is a snapshot of your family, your assets, and the law as they stood on the day you signed it. All three keep moving. A will only takes effect once a court validates it through probate, so a will by itself never avoids probate no matter how recently it was updated. A revocable living trust can avoid probate, but only for assets actually retitled into it. A trust that sits unfunded protects nothing, and property or accounts you acquire after signing do not join the trust automatically. That gap between the plan on paper and the assets you actually own is the most common reason an estate plan fails to do what the client expected.

What life events should trigger a review?

Marriage, divorce, the birth or adoption of a child, and the death of a spouse or a named fiduciary each change who should inherit, who should raise your children, and who should hold authority over your finances or health care if you cannot act for yourself. A divorce deserves an immediate look: an ex-spouse left on a beneficiary designation or named as trustee typically stays there until you affirmatively change it, regardless of what your divorce judgment says about dividing property.

Buying a home, starting a business, or receiving an inheritance also calls for a review, not because the law changed but because your plan has not caught up to your assets. A new house needs a deed into the trust to get the benefit of probate avoidance. A new business needs succession language naming who runs it or who can sell it. An inheritance you receive outright, rather than through a trust, becomes part of your own estate and is exposed to the same rules as everything else you own.

What law changes should prompt a review?

Some of the numbers an estate plan relies on are not permanent. California’s parent-child exclusion under Proposition 19 lets a child keep a parent’s low property tax base year value on an inherited home, but only if the child moves in as a principal residence within one year of the transfer and files for the homeowners’ exemption, and only up to a cap on the home’s value, Revenue and Taxation Code § 63.2. That cap is indexed and reset every two years, currently the home’s factored base year value plus $1,044,586 for transfers occurring February 16, 2025 through February 15, 2027, up from $1,022,600 in the prior period. A plan built around an old cap can understate what your children will actually owe in property tax after they inherit.

Federal numbers move too. The 2026 federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15,000,000 per person, $30,000,000 for a married couple, under Internal Revenue Code § 2010(c), and the 2026 annual gift tax exclusion is $19,000 per recipient, per donor. California itself has no state estate tax and no state inheritance tax, Revenue and Taxation Code § 13301, but plans drafted years ago sometimes still carry tax-driven trust structures built around a far lower federal exemption that no longer serves any purpose and only adds complexity.

California’s small estate procedures reset on a schedule as well. The threshold for using a simplified personal property affidavit instead of full probate is $208,850 for deaths on or after April 1, 2025, Probate Code § 13100, up from $184,500 for deaths between April 1, 2022 and March 31, 2025, and it is due to adjust again on April 1, 2028. A plan that assumes an estate will qualify for a simplified procedure should be checked against the number in effect on the date it actually matters, not the number that applied when the plan was signed.

What happens if you skip the review?

An outdated beneficiary designation on a retirement account or life insurance policy controls over what your will or trust says, so a form you signed decades ago at a former job can override your current intentions entirely. A trust that was never funded, or that was funded but never updated to include a later purchase, leaves those assets to pass through probate instead of the private process the trust was supposed to provide. And a plan that leans on federal or California figures that have since changed can leave your family more complicated, or more exposed, than you intended.

What should you actually check?

Start with beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, life insurance, and payable-on-death or transfer-on-death accounts, since these generally pass outside probate based on the form on file with the institution, not on your will or trust. Confirm your trust is still funded by pulling your most recent deed and account statements and comparing them against the schedule of assets attached to the trust. A trust health check can confirm whether your assets are still titled the way your plan assumes.

Review who you named as trustee, executor, guardian for minor children, and agent under your financial and health care documents. The right people five years ago are not always the right people today, and a change of address, a falling out, or a death among the people you named is reason enough to update those documents. If you have not looked at your power of attorney and health care directive in years, that belongs on the same list.

Figures verified July 2026.

What should you do next?

Pull your trust, will, and beneficiary designations into one folder and compare them against your current family and your current assets. If a major life event has happened since you signed, or you cannot remember the last time you looked at these documents, that is the review. An estate planning attorney can tell you in one meeting whether your plan still does what you think it does.