Decide where it all goes — while it's still your decision.

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: you already have an estate plan. The state wrote it for you. It's called intestacy, it's strictly one-size-fits-all, and it was drafted by people who never met your family, your business, or the brother-in-law you wouldn't trust with a lawnmower. If you'd rather not use the default, you have to write your own. That's the whole pitch.

What happens if you don't decide.

Probate. A public proceeding — anyone can read the file — that runs a year or two of your family's life and skims a percentage of everything you built into fees. Accounts freeze while a court reconstructs what you never wrote down. A judge with a long docket makes the calls you didn't: who gets the house, who runs the business, who raises the kids. Decent people, doing their jobs. Strangers, all the same.

None of that is a scare tactic. It's just the factory setting. And nearly all of it is avoidable with paperwork you can finish in a few unhurried weeks, sitting down, coffee in hand.

Wills, trusts, and the difference.

A will says who gets what and — if your kids are young — who raises them. It's the floor. Everyone needs one. But a will alone still goes through probate; it's instructions for the court, not a way around it.

A living trust is the workhorse. Assets retitled into it pass directly to the people you chose — no court, no public file, no eighteen-month intermission. You keep full control while you're alive; the handoff just happens to be already built. For most California homeowners, the math alone settles the question.

Then the fine print that outranks everything: beneficiary designations. The forms you signed when you opened the 401(k) or the life-insurance policy override your will. All of it. If an ex-spouse is still named on one, the ex gets paid, whatever your will says. We check every account. You'd be amazed how often that one afternoon of checking pays for the entire engagement.

If you own a business.

A business without a succession plan can die with its owner — sometimes within weeks. Who signs the checks Monday morning? Who can talk to the bank, keep the vendors calm, make payroll while everything else is grief and casseroles? A buy-sell agreement, a current valuation, a named successor with actual authority: unglamorous documents that keep the lights on and the family out of a fight. You spent decades building it. Spend a few weeks deciding what happens to it.

How we work it.

We start with a conversation, not a binder. What you own, what you owe, how it's titled, who's named where — the full inventory, on one page, often for the first time ever. Most people find that part strangely calming. The monster under the bed turns out to be a list.

We're the numbers side of the table. We work alongside your estate attorney — or introduce you to one we trust — and we own the tax architecture: estate and gift exposure, step-up in basis, trust taxation, the business valuation, the timing of lifetime gifts. The documents say what you want. We make sure the math agrees.

And then we keep it alive. Marriage, divorce, a birth, a sale, a move across the state line — the plan gets revisited when life changes, because an estate plan isn't a document. It's a standing decision, and we help you keep making it.