Estate Planning in California: The 101 Every Family Deserves

Most of the families we serve did not build their wealth in a brokerage account. It lives in a home, in ground, in an operating business, in accounts spread across decades of work. Estate planning is the set of decisions that determines what happens to all of it when you die or become unable to manage it, and in California the difference between a planned estate and an unplanned one is not subtle. It is measured in tens of thousands of dollars, a year or more of court process, and a public file anyone can read.

Why the living trust sits at the center

A revocable living trust is a container you create during life and keep full control of. You can amend it, revoke it, and act as your own trustee. The planning power is in the titling: assets owned by the trust are not owned by you personally at death, so they do not pass through the probate court. Four consequences follow, and they are the reasons we lead with this topic:

1. 1
   Cost. California sets probate attorney and executor fees by statute as a percentage of the estate's gross value (Probate Code sections 10800 and 10810). Gross means the appraised value of what you own with no deduction for the mortgage or any other debt. The calculator below shows what that schedule produces for your numbers.
2. 2
   Time. An uncontested California probate commonly takes twelve to eighteen months, and the law builds in a four-month creditor claim window before an estate can close. Property in probate is hard to sell, hard to manage, and frozen at exactly the moment a family needs flexibility.
3. 3
   Privacy. A probate file is a public court record: the inventory of what you owned, its appraised values, who is inheriting, and the family disputes along the way. A trust administration is private.
4. 4
   Incapacity. Probate is a death problem; incapacity is the more common one. A funded trust with a named successor trustee lets someone you chose step in and manage things without a court conservatorship if you cannot.

California probate fees are calculated on the gross value of what you own, not what you owe. The mortgage does not reduce the bill.

A hypothetical family, both ways

Consider a Central Valley couple with a home appraised at $850,000 carrying a $350,000 mortgage, forty acres worth $1,200,000, and $350,000 in accounts. Gross estate: $2,400,000. Net of the mortgage: $2,050,000. If the second spouse dies with only a will, the statutory fee base is the full $2,400,000 gross. The schedule produces $37,000 for the attorney and up to another $37,000 for the personal representative, plus a probate referee appraisal fee of roughly $2,000 and court costs. Call it in the neighborhood of $75,000, spread over a year or more, in a public file. The same assets titled to a funded living trust would have passed to the children under the trust's terms with none of that fee schedule applying. This is a hypothetical illustration, not a prediction of any family's outcome, but the arithmetic is the statute's, not ours.

The five documents of a complete plan

The trust is the center, not the whole. A California foundation typically means five documents working together:

1. 1
   Revocable living trust. Holds title to the major assets and says who manages and who inherits, on what terms and timing. Only works for assets actually titled to it.
2. 2
   Pour-over will. The safety net. Anything accidentally left outside the trust gets directed into it, and this is where guardians for minor children are nominated.
3. 3
   Durable power of attorney for finances. Names who can act on financial matters outside the trust (tax filings, retirement accounts, insurance) if you are incapacitated.
4. 4
   Advance health care directive. Names who makes medical decisions when you cannot, and records your own wishes so that person is not guessing under pressure.
5. 5
   HIPAA authorization. Lets doctors actually talk to the people you named. Without it, privacy law can wall off even a spouse or adult child from information.

And the step families skip: funding. A beautifully drafted trust that never receives title to the house, the land, or the accounts is a binder on a shelf; those assets still go through probate. Retitling assets, coordinating beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance, and keeping all of it current as life changes is precisely the kind of work that sits between the attorney's office and your financial life. It is where we spend much of our time.

The 18th birthday problem

Here is the part of this page we most want parents and grandparents to read. The day a child turns 18, you lose the automatic legal right to make medical decisions for them or even to receive information about their condition. If a 19-year-old is in an accident three hours away at college, the hospital is not required to tell you anything, and in our experience that is exactly the moment families discover it.

We believe every family with children over the age of majority should have three documents in place for each of them: an advance health care directive, a HIPAA authorization, and a durable power of attorney. They are among the least expensive documents in estate planning, and in our view mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa, can and should be the ones to pay for them. It is a modest cost that buys the ability to show up for your own child when it matters most, and it is often the most natural way to start the next generation's planning conversation.

The attorney's office, without the fear

Most people meet with an estate attorney a handful of times in their life. The vocabulary is unfamiliar, the clock is running, and many clients tell us afterward that they did not ask half their questions because they did not want to sound uninformed or add to the bill. The result is a plan that is legally sound but was never fully understood by the family it protects, and decisions (who serves as successor trustee, who holds the medical power, what age the kids inherit) made in the room under time pressure.

That gap between the attorney's work and the family's understanding is the gap we exist to close. Here is what that looks like in practice:

What you leave the table with: the Estate Plan Review

A finished estate plan is often ninety pages of legal drafting. It protects your family; it does not explain itself. So after the attorney's work is signed, we build every family a document we call the Estate Plan Review: a plain-language roadmap of your specific plan, page by page:

1. 1
   The big picture. How your trust works in one page, and the three phases of the plan: today, while you control everything; incapacity, when someone you chose steps in; and passing, when the trust distributes privately with no probate.
2. 2
   The key people. Every role filled in, with alternates: trustees and successor trustee, financial power of attorney, health care agent, executor. Who steps in, in what order, under what conditions.
3. 3
   How assets flow. What the plan covers and how it is titled, how the estate divides, what happens in the hard scenarios: a first spouse passing, a beneficiary under the age you set, a child who passes before you.
4. 4
   The action steps. Titling to confirm, beneficiary designations to align, who holds copies, and when the plan gets reviewed next.

We print it in a large presentation format, bigger than a legal pad, on purpose: a document that size does not disappear into a drawer. Families use it two ways. First, to walk the next generation through how the estate is actually set up, in language everyone at the table can follow. Second, to answer the question every family asks a few years in: "who did we assign to what, again?" The Review is a summary for understanding, not a legal interpretation of your documents, and it never replaces your attorney's counsel. But it is the difference between owning an estate plan and understanding one.

This work is part of our flat-fee advisory engagement; we charge nothing extra for it and receive nothing from any attorney. If you already have counsel, we work with them. If you need one, we introduce candidates and you choose. Our published fees are on the services and fees page, and the deeper look at how the whole coordination model works is in Our Process.

Where taxes fit, briefly

Two pieces of good news and one caution. California has no state estate tax and no inheritance tax. The federal estate tax applies only above $15,000,000 per person for deaths in 2026, roughly double for a married couple with portability, so most families' planning problem is probate and process, not estate tax. The caution: families near or above the exemption, which a large operation with land and water can reach faster than its owners expect, need additional trust planning where structure and timing genuinely matter, work that belongs in front of estate counsel early. And whatever your size, how assets pass affects income taxes through the basis rules we cover in Stepped-Up Basis on Inherited Farmland. For the probate numbers in full detail, see What California Probate Actually Costs.