Both decide who inherits. They differ in what happens between your death and that inheritance actually arriving. Three questions usually settle it.
A will says who gets what, and who raises your children. A living trust says the same things — and also holds the assets, so they can be handed over without a court involved. Choosing between them is less about what you own than about what you want the process to look like.
This is the one that decides it for most people. A house in your own name goes through probate, and California's probate fees are calculated on its gross value before the mortgage. If you own a home here, a trust usually pays for itself several times over.
Probate files are public records. The inventory, the valuations, the beneficiaries and their shares are all readable by anyone. A trust administration is private — nothing is filed, nothing is published.
Probate puts a court timetable between your family and your estate. A successor trustee can act immediately. If the person who would be sorting out your affairs lives out of state, has a job they cannot leave, or simply would not cope with a year of court deadlines, that matters more than the fee comparison.
A living trust still needs a pour-over will alongside it, as a safety net for anything never transferred in. And a will is the only place you can nominate a guardian for minor children — a trust cannot do that. Anyone with children under eighteen needs a will whether or not they also have a trust.
Both documents only operate after death. If you are alive but cannot make decisions, your family needs a durable power of attorney for finances and an advance health care directive for medical choices. Without them the route is conservatorship — a court process, public, and more expensive than probate.
This article is general information about California law, not legal advice about your situation. My Wise Legacy is a document preparation service and not a law firm.
Probate is the court process that transfers what you owned to the people who inherit it. In California it is slow, public, and priced as a percentage of your estate. Here is what that means in practice.
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