A California estate plan built to hold.

By Woodbury Law Group Last reviewed August 1, 2026

Here is what happens in California when someone dies without a plan. Their property passes according to the intestacy statutes, a set of default rules in the Probate Code that know nothing about the person, the family, or what anyone would have wanted. 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 Glendale house alone exceed $40,000, calculated on the gross value without subtracting the mortgage.

All of that is only the default. An estate plan replaces it with your own decisions, and for most families the whole process takes a few weeks, start to finish.

What a complete plan includes

Estate planning is not one document. 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 to your beneficiaries without probate, privately and on your terms.
• A will, in a trust-based plan a "pour-over" will, which catches anything left outside the trust and, critically, nominates guardians for minor children.
• A durable power of attorney, so someone you chose can pay your mortgage and manage your accounts if you become incapacitated, without a court-supervised conservatorship.
• An advance health care directive, naming your medical decision-maker and recording your wishes.
• Beneficiary designations and trust funding, the unglamorous step where the plan either works or fails. We handle the deed transferring your home into the trust and walk you through retitling accounts.

Families with a child who has a disability often add a special needs trust so an inheritance never disqualifies that child from SSI or Medi-Cal. Parents of minor children think hardest about guardianship nominations, and we give that decision the time it deserves.

The conversations that matter more than the documents

The drafting is our job. The decisions are yours, and they deserve unhurried attention. Who should serve as trustee, and is your eldest child actually the right choice, or just the expected one? Should your children inherit at eighteen, or in stages? What happens to the house on the hill in La Crescenta that one child wants and the other two would rather sell? If you own a small business, who can sign payroll the week after something happens to you?

These questions are most of what a first meeting at Woodbury Law Group is about. You will not be handed a questionnaire and a binder. You will sit with attorneys whose probate practice shows them where plans hold up and where they quietly fall apart, and you will hear the difference.

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 changed property tax inheritance in 2021: children who inherit a home now generally face reassessment unless one of them makes it a primary residence within a year, and even then the exclusion is capped. There is no California estate tax, and the federal estate tax only reaches estates in the many millions, so for most families the real enemies are probate costs, delay, and family conflict, not taxes. A plan addresses all three.