Palo Alto Estate Planning Attorney

It changes what the trust has to say. A concentrated position, restricted stock units with years left to vest, or shares that are not yet liquid all need to be named rather than swept up by a general clause about personal property. A successor trustee needs actual authority to hold or sell a concentrated position and some guidance on which, because doing nothing and doing the wrong thing are both decisions. It also affects titling: shares held in a brokerage account that was never retitled into the trust sit outside it no matter what the trust says.

Your company’s equity plan decides that, not your estate plan. Plan documents differ — some accelerate vesting on death, some forfeit the unvested portion, some continue it for a defined window — so the answer is in the grant agreement rather than in your trust. What your plan can do is make sure whatever does pay out has somewhere to land and someone with authority to deal with the company, which is usually where the delay happens.

Usually the pressure is property tax rather than estate tax. California has no state estate tax, and the federal exemption is high, indexed, and periodically changed by Congress, so it is checked against the current figure rather than assumed. The live issue is Proposition 19: if a child does not make the home their principal residence, the property is generally reassessed to current market value, and on a home held since the 1970s that can be a very different annual bill from the one you pay now. That is a cash-flow question worth answering while planning.

Real property is governed by the law of the state it sits in. If it is still held in your own name at death, that state can require its own ancillary probate even when everything in California passes cleanly through your trust — two court processes instead of none. Transferring out-of-state real property into the trust is usually the fix, and it has to be done with a deed valid in that state.

Generally yes, and selling later is not made harder by it. A revocable living trust is disregarded for income-tax purposes while you are alive, so your basis is unchanged and the capital-gains exclusion on the sale of a principal residence is not lost by holding the home in your own revocable trust. Leaving the house out in the meantime is the part that carries risk, because the gap is exactly when an unexpected death sends it to probate.

Yes. California does not require a trustee to live in the state. The practical questions are different ones: whether they can deal with a California property and California institutions from where they are, whether the co-trustee arrangement you have in mind will slow every decision down, and whether a professional or corporate trustee belongs in the structure for the administration phase. Naming someone is easy; naming someone who can actually act is the work.

An outright inheritance can disqualify a person from need-based public benefits, so the usual answer is a properly drafted special needs trust that supplements rather than replaces those benefits. It has to be set up before the money arrives to do its job, which is why this is a planning decision rather than something the family sorts out afterwards. It also affects who you name as trustee, because that role continues for a long time.

Flat fee, quoted before any work starts, once we know what you own and how it is titled — that is what the design meeting is for. We do not charge for the design meeting itself. Pricing a plan before anyone has looked at the deed is how people end up paying for documents they did not need and missing the funding step that does the actual work.

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.