A California estate plan built to hold.

When a Californian dies without a plan, their property passes under the intestacy statutes, default rules that know nothing about the person or the family. If the estate holds more than a threshold amount (currently $208,850 for deaths on or after April 1, 2025), it generally must pass through probate at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Probate is public, slow, and expensive: a routine administration runs nine to eighteen months, and the statutory fees on a $900,000 house alone exceed $40,000, calculated on the gross value without subtracting the mortgage. An estate plan replaces all of that with your own decisions, and for most families the whole process takes a few weeks.

What a complete plan includes

A California plan that actually protects your family usually has five working parts, and they fit together.

• A revocable living trust, which holds title to your home and major assets so they pass without probate.
• A will, in a trust-based plan a "pour-over" will, which catches anything left outside the trust and nominates guardians for minor children.
• A durable power of attorney, so someone you chose can manage your finances if you become incapacitated, without a conservatorship.
• An advance health care directive, naming your medical decision-maker and recording your wishes.
• Beneficiary designations and trust funding, the step where the plan either works or fails. We handle the deed moving your home into the trust.

The conversations that matter more than the documents

The drafting is our job. The decisions are yours, and they deserve unhurried attention. Naming a trustee is usually harder than people expect; the eldest child is the expected choice, not always the right one. Parents have to decide whether children inherit at eighteen or in stages. And some of the hardest questions do not look legal at all, like what happens to the house on the hill in La Crescenta that one child wants and the other two would rather sell. These questions are most of what a first meeting at Woodbury Law Group is about. Because we also handle probate, we see what happens to plans that were unclear or never funded, and when a plan is finally needed, our trust administration practice guides your successor trustee through carrying it out.

California specifics worth knowing

A few rules shape nearly every plan we write. California is a community property state, which affects how spouses hold title and what each can give away. Proposition 19 sharply narrowed the property tax break children once kept when inheriting a home. And there is no California estate tax, while the federal estate tax only reaches estates in the many millions, so for most families the practical concerns are probate costs, delay, and family conflict rather than taxes.