Palo Alto Estate Planning Attorney

No. A will directs the probate court; it does not bypass it. Assets that pass under a will generally go through the court process. What avoids probate is holding assets in a funded living trust, or having a valid beneficiary designation, or fitting a small-estate procedure.

For most Bay Area homeowners a trust is the document that does the heavy lifting, because the home is the asset that would otherwise drive a probate. Whether it is right for you depends on how the property is titled, what else you own, and who you want to manage it if you cannot.

Probate Code section 6401 applies. Your spouse receives your one-half of the community property. Your separate property is divided: one-half to your spouse if you have one child, one-third if you have more than one child. A court applies that formula regardless of what anyone believes you wanted.

A will speaks only after death and works through the court. A living trust works during your life as well: if you become unable to manage your affairs, your successor trustee can act on the trust’s assets without a court proceeding. That living-benefit gap is the reason most California plans are built around a trust.

A durable power of attorney names someone to handle financial matters if you cannot. California publishes a statutory form at Probate Code section 4401. Without one, your family’s route to paying your bills is a court-supervised conservatorship.

Whoever you name in an advance health care directive, the form for which is published at Probate Code section 4701. If nobody is named, the decision falls to whoever the hospital and the law identify, which may not be the person you would have chosen.

Reread it whenever a name or an asset changes: a move, a marriage or divorce, a birth, a death, a new property, a new business, or a refinance. Property tax rules for inherited homes also changed with Proposition 19 in 2021, so plans drafted before then are worth checking against current rules.

Yes, for the accounts they cover. Retirement accounts and life insurance pay whoever is on the form. Probate Code section 5000 confirms these nonprobate transfers are valid even though they are not executed like a will, so the form controls regardless of what your will says.

Yes. Our office is at 100 Century Center Ct. in San Jose, about 25 minutes from Palo Alto by 101 or 280, and we also meet by secure video when that is easier. Palo Alto is in Santa Clara County, so anything that has to be filed is filed in the same court we already appear in.

For most Palo Alto homeowners the home is the asset that would otherwise drive a probate, and California’s statutory fees are calculated on the gross value of the estate rather than on the equity. That arithmetic is usually what earns the trust its place here. Whether it is right for you still depends on how the property is titled and what else you own.

Often the documents are fine and the funding is not. The most common thing we find on a long-held Palo Alto property is a trust that was properly signed alongside a deed that was never changed, which leaves the house outside the trust and back in the court process. It is worth checking the deed and the account titling even when the binder looks complete.

Proposition 19 narrowed the parent-child exclusion from property-tax reassessment. Since February 2021, in most cases a child has to make the home their principal residence for the exclusion to apply at all, and the amount excluded is capped. Whether that changes what you should do depends on how the property is titled and what your children actually intend, which is one of the first things we look at for a long-held Palo Alto home.