California Estate Planning

What Is Estate Planning?

Estate planning is the attorney-assisted process that examines your needs and assets and helps you realize your goals. There are two major goals in most estate planning: to keep costs down and to make it as efficient as possible.

Incapacity

One of hazards of life is incapacity. Legal incapacity means that an individual can no longer make decisions for himself or herself. This creates significant problems in dealing with finances and health care decisions.

Advance Health Care Directive

We try to help people deal with medical decisions in the event that they become incapacitated before they pass away. In California, this document is called an Advance Health Care Directive, which we prepare for our clients. It allows an individual's nominee to make health care decisions on behalf of someone who is incapacitated.

Durable Power of Attorney

To assist people with financial decisions if they become incapacitated, we prepare a document called a Durable Power of Attorney. This document allows a nominee to make financial decisions on behalf of a person who becomes incapacitated. The equivalent of a Durable Power of Attorney is also drafted into most living trusts to allow the trustee to make decisions for someone who is incapacitated.

Avoiding the Legal System

As with trusts, the Advance Health Care Directive and the Durable Power of Attorney have a simple concept driving them: to avoid the legal system. Unhappily, the public's perception that the legal system is inefficient and expensive is all too true. If someone becomes incapacitated without an Advance Health Care Directive or Durable Power of Attorney, then the only recourse in California is a costly process called a conservatorship.

Avoiding Probate; Reducing Taxes

A trust is part of any sophisticated estate plan. It avoids the costs and delays of our legal system that deals with an individual's property after death. Properly done, a trust may also avoid inheritance taxes. The current exclusion for inheritance taxes is $1.5 million in the State of California. If you are fortunate enough to be worth more than $1.5 million, a trust may assist you in avoiding some or all of the estate taxes that may otherwise arise after you pass away.