California Trust Drafting Attorneys

A will alone does not avoid California probate. Even a well-drafted will sends your estate to probate court when you pass away, where it will sit for 12 to 18 months and pay statutory fees that scale with your estate's value. A revocable living trust transfers your assets directly to your beneficiaries without court involvement. Most California families with a home, retirement accounts, or minor children benefit from holding both: a trust to control what happens to titled assets, and a pour-over will as a backstop for anything left outside the trust.

A revocable living trust can be amended, restated, or revoked at any time during your lifetime. You remain the trustee, you control the assets, and you can change beneficiaries. It is the standard tool for probate avoidance and incapacity planning. An irrevocable trust generally cannot be undone once funded. You give up control in exchange for benefits a revocable trust cannot offer: removing assets from your taxable estate, shielding them from creditors, qualifying for Medi-Cal long-term care, or funding a beneficiary with special needs without disqualifying them from public benefits. We will tell you which fits your situation. And we will not recommend an irrevocable trust unless the benefit clearly justifies the trade-off.

Proposition 19, effective February 2021, narrowed the parent-child property tax exclusion. A child who inherits a California home held in a trust now keeps the parent's low Prop 13 assessed value only if the home becomes the child's primary residence within one year, and even then only up to a $1 million value cushion above the original assessment. For families holding rental property, vacation homes, or homes likely to be sold by heirs, Prop 19 can mean a multi-fold property tax increase on inherited California real estate. We design trusts with Prop 19 in mind, including LLC ownership structures, lifetime gifting strategies, and irrevocable trust techniques, to preserve as much of the assessed value as your situation allows.

Funding is the step most DIY trusts get wrong. A trust controls only the assets that have been retitled into its name. For a California home, that means recording a new grant deed transferring the property from you as an individual to you as trustee. For bank and brokerage accounts, it means changing the account titling. For retirement accounts and life insurance, it means updating beneficiary designations. We handle this paperwork as part of every trust engagement, including drafting and recording the deed for your primary California residence, so you do not end the process with an unfunded trust that still sends your estate to probate.

Most clients serve as their own trustee while alive, keeping full control of their assets, and name a successor trustee to step in at incapacity or death. The right successor depends on your family. An adult child often makes sense if they are financially responsible and not in conflict with other beneficiaries. A professional fiduciary or trust company is the better call when family dynamics are difficult, when beneficiaries include minors or someone with special needs, or when trust assets include a closely-held business. We discuss the trade-offs in your consultation and help you choose someone who will actually do the job, not just hold the title.

Trust pricing scales with complexity: number of beneficiaries, real estate holdings, business assets, and whether you need specialized provisions for blended families, special needs, or asset protection. Our basic California living trust package is far less than the typical statutory probate fee on a single home in Northern California, which routinely exceeds $20,000 in court costs alone. Call (415) 275-1492 for a free consultation and a clear, written estimate before you commit to anything.