FAQ

Most California families we work with end up with both, because each does a different job. A will is your written instructions for who receives what and — if you have minor children — who raises them; but a will alone goes through probate, the court process for settling an estate. A revocable living trust holds your assets during your life and passes them to the people you name without probate, which in California is the difference that saves your family the most time and money. In practice, a trust-centered plan usually pairs the trust with a “pour-over” will that acts as a backstop, plus powers of attorney and a health care directive. Which combination is right depends on what you own and your family situation — that’s exactly what the first conversation is for. The clearest way to find out is a free 15-minute Discovery Call.

The short version: a will takes effect only at death and must be validated by a probate court before anything is distributed; a living trust takes effect as soon as it’s signed and funded, works while you’re alive (including if you become incapacitated), and transfers assets to your beneficiaries without court involvement. A will is public once it enters probate — anyone can read it — while a trust stays private. A will can name guardians for minor children; a trust cannot, which is one reason the two are used together. For most homeowners in Contra Costa County, the deciding factor is California’s probate cost and timeline, covered below.

A complete plan in California is usually four or five core documents working together: a revocable living trust (holds your assets, avoids probate, plans for incapacity); a pour-over will (names guardians for minor children and catches anything not titled in the trust); a durable power of attorney for finances (lets someone you trust manage your legal and financial affairs if you can’t); an advance health care directive (states your medical wishes and names the person who speaks for you); and the trust funding itself — retitling your home and accounts into the trust, without which the trust can’t do its job. Depending on your situation, the plan may add beneficiary-designation coordination, a transfer-on-death deed, or more advanced trusts. We build the plan around your family rather than a template.

Probate is the court-supervised process of validating a will, paying a person’s final debts, and distributing what’s left to their heirs. In California it runs through the Superior Court in the county where the person lived — for our clients, usually Contra Costa County. It is public, it follows a fixed statutory timeline, and it carries statutory fees set by law. Most estate planning for California homeowners is designed to keep assets out of probate, because the process is slower and costlier here than in many states. See the California Courts’ probate self-help guide for the official overview.

Plan on roughly nine months to a year and a half for a typical estate, and longer if the estate is large, contested, or includes hard-to-value assets. California law gives the executor or administrator one year from appointment to complete the estate (or up to 18 months if a federal estate-tax return is required), and asks the court for extensions when there are delays. During that window, assets are generally tied up — beneficiaries usually can’t be paid until the process is well underway. A properly funded living trust avoids this timeline almost entirely, which is the main reason California families use one.

California is one of the few states that sets attorney and executor fees by statute as a percentage of the estate’s gross value — meaning the mortgage and other debts are not subtracted first. Under Probate Code § 10810, the schedule is 4% of the first $100,000, 3% of the next $100,000, 2% of the next $800,000, 1% of the next $9 million, and 0.5% of the next $15 million. The executor is entitled to that same fee under § 10800, so it can effectively apply twice, on top of court filing fees, a probate referee’s appraisal, and publication costs.

A worked example: a $1,000,000 home — even with a large mortgage — generates a statutory fee of about $23,000 for the attorney and the same again for the executor — roughly $46,000 total, before other costs. That is the number a living trust is designed to avoid. Because the fee is based on gross value, a modest Bay Area home with significant equity can generate substantial probate fees.

Several tools keep assets out of probate, and most plans combine them: a revocable living trust (the most comprehensive — it can hold your home, accounts, and other assets and distribute them privately); beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance; payable-on-death and transfer-on-death registrations on bank and brokerage accounts; a transfer-on-death deed for a primary residence (with real limits — see below); and, for small estates, California’s simplified non-probate procedures. The personal-property small-estate affidavit covers estates of personal property worth $208,850 or less for deaths on or after April 1, 2025 (Probate Code § 13100); real estate has its own separate, lower thresholds. The right mix depends on what you own — if you own a home, you may want a trust so your home can avoid probate.

No — and this is one of the most common misunderstandings we hear. A will is the document that directs a probate; it does not avoid one. When someone dies with only a will, the will is filed with the court and the estate goes through the probate process described above before anyone inherits. Avoiding probate requires moving assets through a trust, beneficiary designations, or the other non-probate tools above. If you have a will but no trust, your family will likely still face California probate. And if you have no plan at all, your assets still pass through probate.

If you die without a will or trust (“intestate”), California law decides who inherits, under the intestate-succession rules in Probate Code § 6400 and following. The split depends on California’s community-property system: your spouse or registered domestic partner generally keeps their half of the community property and receives a share of your separate property, with the rest going to children, then parents, then more distant relatives. Two consequences surprise people most: stepchildren you never legally adopted generally do not inherit under these rules, and the court — not you — decides who is appointed and, for minor children, who is considered for guardian. The estate still goes through probate. Writing your own plan is how you replace the state’s default with your own choices.

If both parents are gone and there’s no nomination, a California judge decides who becomes your children’s guardian, choosing from whoever steps forward — which may not be who you would have chosen. You name your preferred guardian in your will (a trust can’t do this), and we often pair that with short-term emergency instructions so there’s never a gap while the court confirms the long-term guardian. For parents of young children, this is usually the single most important reason to put a plan in place, and it’s a core piece of CTL’s Family tier.

A durable power of attorney for finances names someone you trust (your “agent”) to handle money and legal matters — paying bills, managing accounts, dealing with the house — if you can’t. “Durable” means it stays in effect if you become incapacitated, which is the entire point; an ordinary power of attorney ends exactly when you’d need it most. Without one, your family may have to ask a court to appoint a conservator, a slow, public, and expensive process. Everyone over 18 benefits from having one, and it belongs in every complete plan alongside your health care directive.

They cover two different parts of your life. A financial (durable) power of attorney authorizes your agent to handle money and property if you’re unable to. An advance health care directive authorizes a different (or the same) person to make medical decisions for you, and records your wishes about treatment. Keeping them separate lets you name, say, one person who’s good with money and another who’s the right voice in a hospital. Together they make sure that if you’re ever incapacitated, both your finances and your care are handled by people you chose — not by a court.

In California the controlling document is the advance health care directive, authorized by Probate Code § 4600 and following. It does two things: it names the person who speaks for you on medical decisions if you can’t (your health care agent), and it records your treatment wishes. “Living will” is the older, generic term many people still use for the wishes part; California folds that into the single advance directive. If you’ve heard both terms, they’re pointing at the same goal — making your medical wishes known and putting a trusted person in charge — and in California you accomplish it with the advance health care directive.

No. California has no state estate tax and no state inheritance tax — there’s been no California estate-tax return requirement for deaths on or after January 1, 2005 (California State Controller, estate tax). The only estate tax that can apply to a California resident is the federal one, and it affects very few families: for 2026 the federal exemption is $15 million per person ($30 million for a married couple), made permanent and indexed for inflation by the 2025 federal tax law (IRS, 2026 inflation adjustments). For most Bay Area families the estate-tax question isn’t the issue — avoiding probate and protecting the next generation’s property-tax basis is.

Proposition 19 (effective for parent-child transfers since February 16, 2021) narrowed a long-standing benefit. Before, parents could pass California real estate to children and the children kept the parents’ low Prop 13 property-tax basis. Now that protection applies only to a primary residence, and only if the child makes it their own primary residence (and files for the exclusion within the required window). Even then, the protected amount is capped: the parents’ factored base-year value plus $1,044,586 for transfers from February 16, 2025 through February 15, 2027 (the figure is re-indexed every two years by the State Board of Equalization, Prop 19). Vacation homes, rentals, and second homes no longer qualify and are reassessed to market value at transfer — often a large property-tax increase. There are planning steps that can help in specific situations; this is one of the most important reasons for Contra Costa families to revisit an older plan.

California’s revocable transfer-on-death (TOD) deed (Probate Code § 5600 and following) lets you name who receives your home when you die, without probate, and you can revoke it any time while you’re alive. It’s inexpensive and simple — but limited. It applies only to a primary residence of one-to-four residential units or a condominium (not rentals, land, or commercial property); it does nothing if you become incapacitated; it can’t hold the property for a minor or stagger an inheritance; and it can create complications with co-owners or competing beneficiaries. For someone whose only significant asset is their home and who wants it to go outright to one adult child, it can be a reasonable tool. For most families — blended families, minor beneficiaries, more than one property, or anyone who wants incapacity protection — a living trust does far more. We’ll tell you honestly which one fits.

Joint tenancy is a way two or more people hold title together so that when one owner dies, their share passes automatically to the surviving owner(s) — outside of probate. It’s common between spouses and is simple, but it’s a blunt tool: it offers no plan for incapacity, no control over what happens after the survivor dies, and it can carry unintended gift-tax or property-tax consequences and capital-gains “basis” tradeoffs compared with holding the home in a trust. In community-property California, spouses often have better options than joint tenancy for the family home. It’s worth reviewing how your house is actually titled — it’s the first thing we check.

Beneficiary designations are the instructions you put directly on accounts — retirement plans (401(k), IRA), life insurance, and “payable-on-death” or “transfer-on-death” bank and brokerage accounts — naming who receives them when you die. They pass outside your will and outside probate, and they override what your will or trust says about that account. That power is also the danger: an outdated beneficiary form (an ex-spouse, a deceased relative, or a minor named outright) can quietly undo an otherwise careful plan. Coordinating these designations with your trust is a routine but essential part of building a plan that actually works.

Funding a trust means retitling your assets into the name of the trust — recording a new deed for your home, changing the ownership on bank and brokerage accounts, and coordinating beneficiary designations. This step is what people most often skip, and an unfunded trust is the most common reason a family ends up in probate despite having paid for a trust. The trust can only avoid probate for the assets it actually holds. CTL treats funding as part of the job, not an afterthought, and walks clients through retitling so the plan does what it was built to do.

Some assets are better left out and handled with beneficiary designations instead. Retirement accounts (401(k), IRA, 403(b)) generally should not be retitled into a trust — doing so can trigger tax — so you name beneficiaries instead, sometimes the trust itself with careful drafting. Health savings accounts stay individually owned. Life insurance is usually directed by beneficiary designation rather than owned by a revocable trust (a separate irrevocable trust is a different strategy). Vehicles are often left out because California has simple transfer procedures. The point isn’t a fixed list — it’s coordinating which assets go in the trust and which pass by designation, so nothing is missed and nothing is taxed unnecessarily. This coordination is exactly what we map during planning.

Review your plan after any major life change and, even without one, every three to five years. The events that most often call for an update: a marriage, divorce, birth, or death in the family; a child reaching adulthood; a move into or out of California; a significant change in assets (selling a business, buying property, an inheritance); a named executor, trustee, guardian, or agent who is no longer the right choice; and changes in the law — California’s Proposition 19 alone made many older plans worth revisiting. An out-of-date plan can be worse than none, because it sends your family confident but wrong instructions. CTL’s Legacy tier includes an Annual Relationship Review for exactly this reason.

A valid trust or will generally remains valid when you cross state lines — but “valid” isn’t the same as “optimized.” States differ on community property, spousal rights, powers-of-attorney and health-directive forms that hospitals and banks will actually accept, and especially on property tax and probate. Someone moving into California should have the plan reviewed for community-property and Prop 19 implications; someone moving out should have it checked against the new state’s rules and update the health and financial documents to local forms. A review is far cheaper than discovering the gap later. If you’ve moved in the last few years and haven’t had your plan looked at, that’s worth a Discovery Call.

A revocable living trust can be changed or undone any time during your life. An irrevocable trust generally cannot be changed once created — you give up control in exchange for benefits the revocable trust can’t provide, such as removing assets (and their future growth) from your taxable estate, protecting assets from certain creditors, or holding life insurance outside your estate. Because most California families fall well under the $15 million federal estate-tax exemption, the majority need only a revocable trust; irrevocable trusts come into play for larger estates, specific asset-protection goals, special-needs planning, or certain tax strategies. It’s a precision tool, not a default — we recommend one only when your situation genuinely calls for it.

Blended families are where do-it-yourself plans most often fall short. The classic problem: leave everything outright to your spouse, and there’s nothing to legally require that your children from a prior relationship are ever provided for — the surviving spouse can change their own plan later. A properly drafted trust can provide for your spouse for life while keeping the remainder on course for your children, name independent trustees to keep the peace, and address a shared home, prior-marriage obligations, and differing situations among children. This is detailed, personal work that a template can’t do well. It’s one of the situations where having a California attorney who plans for your family, rather than a form, matters most.

A person receiving needs-based public benefits (such as SSI or Medi-Cal) can lose eligibility if they inherit assets outright. A special-needs trust (sometimes called a supplemental-needs trust) holds an inheritance for their benefit without disqualifying them, paying for things that improve quality of life beyond what the benefits cover. The trust must be drafted carefully and paired with the right trustee and a letter of intent describing the person’s needs and routines. If you have a child or grandchild with a disability, this should be built into the plan deliberately — not left to a general bequest. We handle this as part of tailored planning.

Your “digital estate” — email, photos, financial logins, cloud storage, social media, crypto, and online businesses — can be lost or locked if no one has legal authority to reach it. California has adopted the law that lets you grant a trusted person access to digital assets through your estate plan (the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Probate Code § 870 and following). Practically, that means giving your trustee and agents the right authority in your documents, leaving secure instructions for where things live (without putting passwords in the documents themselves), and using providers’ legacy-contact tools where they exist. A modern plan should address this; many older ones don’t.

What a trust costs depends on your family and what you own — a single person with one home is not the same project as a blended family with a business and out-of-state property, so we don’t quote a flat price online. The right number comes from understanding your situation first. What’s worth weighing against it is the alternative: California’s statutory probate fees on a $1,000,000 estate run to roughly $46,000 — about $23,000 each for the attorney and the executor — so a plan typically costs a fraction of what probate would cost your family later. At CTL, the path is simple: start with a free 15-minute Discovery Call, then a Strategic Planning Session where Kelly identifies what you need and recommends one of three clear tiers — Foundation, Family, or Legacy (planning tiers) — so you see the scope and price before you commit.

Online tools can produce a basic document, and for a very simple situation that may be a start. But the failures we see are rarely about the paperwork — they’re about what the form didn’t ask: an unfunded trust that still lands the family in probate, a beneficiary designation that quietly overrode the will, a Prop 19 trap on the family home, a blended-family gap, an out-of-date guardian. A form can’t notice those; it doesn’t know your family. Working with a California attorney means the plan is built around your actual situation, the trust is properly funded, and there’s a person who knows your file when your family needs to use it. For most homeowners with a house and people they care about, that difference is the whole value.

Getting started is one step: a free 15-minute Discovery Call, where we learn your situation and point you to the right next move. For most people that’s the Strategic Planning Session — two hours with Kelly to review what you have, identify the gaps, and outline the plan and the right tier for your family. The session is complimentary when you arrive with your planning materials assembled from our simple checklist; if you’d rather have Kelly’s team organize everything with you during the session, it’s $750 — additional service, not a fee for being unprepared. If you already have an estate plan and just want it reviewed, the Estate Plan Review Session ($950, credited toward your plan if you move forward) is built for that. Either way, the Discovery Call is the front door.

You’d be working with Kelly Balamuth, a fourth-generation Californian and second-generation attorney who has practiced in Contra Costa County for more than 30 years — the kind of local continuity that matters when a plan has to hold up for the next generation.