A living trust that is actually funded, powers of attorney that a bank will honour, and property titled where it belongs.
An estate plan is not a stack of documents. It is a set of instructions that has to work on the worst day of your family's life, when you are not there to explain it. Most of the plans we read would not. They were drafted correctly and then never finished, and the gap between signing and funding is where families lose years and a great deal of money.
A revocable living trust keeps your estate out of probate, keeps it private, and lets someone you chose step in without a court appointment. It only does any of that if the assets are actually inside it. We prepare the deeds, record them, and retitle the accounts, and we give you a one-page schedule showing exactly what is in and what is not.
The pour-over will catches anything the trust missed. The durable power of attorney is what a bank will actually accept, which is not the same as what a form will produce. The health directive names the person who decides, and says what they should decide.
This is the step nearly everyone skips. Real property, bank and brokerage accounts, business interests, life insurance and retirement beneficiary designations each move differently, and retirement accounts must not move into a trust at all. We do the work and we hand you the list.
If a company is the largest thing you own, the estate plan and the operating agreement have to agree with each other. Most of the time they do not, and the buy-sell provision quietly overrides everything the trust says.
When someone dies we handle the administration: notices, valuations, tax filings, and distributions. If there is no plan, or the plan fails, we handle the probate.
Our trust package starts at $3,500 flat, and that figure includes funding: deeds prepared and recorded, and accounts retitled. Firms quoting a lower number are usually quoting drafting only, and the funding is billed hourly afterwards or simply left to you.
In California, an estate with real property or roughly $200,000 in assets will generally go through probate on a will alone. Probate here typically runs a year or more and the statutory fees are set by law on the gross value of the estate. A trust avoids that.
It does very little. Assets left outside the trust pass under the will and go through probate anyway, which is the outcome the trust was bought to prevent. This is the single most common defect we find.
Often, and the details matter: due-on-sale language, the lender, the insurance, the county transfer tax exemption, and how the LLC interest is then held by the trust. Done in the wrong order it triggers a reassessment or voids coverage.
Yes. That is the plan review, $750 flat, findings in one week, and you are under no obligation to have us fix anything we find.