Plan for the Ones You Love

Most attorneys will tell you it’s “drafting wills, trusts, and powers of attorney” — and that’s true, but those are the byproducts, not the work. The real job is designing what happens to the people, pets, and things you love when life takes a turn: a hospital stay, a sudden move, the eventual goodbye. Who steps in if you can’t make decisions? Who raises the kids? What happens to the house, the business, the collection? At AMO LAW, understanding those answers is how we ensure your plan will actually achieve the outcome you’re envisioning for your legacy. The legal documents are just how we make them enforceable.

A will is your default-settings document: who gets what, who’s in charge, who raises your kids. The catch most people don’t know: in California, a will doesn’t avoid probate — it’s the document probate uses. Probate is a court process that’s public, slow (often 9 to 18 months, sometimes longer), and expensive. The average California probate runs about 5% of the market value of your assets — and the fees are calculated on the gross value, not your equity. With the average California home around $800,000, that’s roughly $40,000 in probate costs alone, before anything reaches your family. A living trust sidesteps that whole process for assets you’ve properly funded into it, keeps your affairs private, and works whether you’re incapacitated or deceased. For most California homeowners, that combination matters enough to lean trust-forward. That said, not everyone needs one — we’ll tell you honestly whether a trust earns its keep for your situation or whether a will plus a few other tools will do the job. Every great story has an after-credits scene — that moment after the main story ends that hints at what comes next. Your life has one too. The question is whether you’ll write it intentionally, or leave it to chance. That’s the work we do together. We design the after-credits scene of your life — so that long after the credits roll, the people you love still know exactly who you were, what you wanted, and how you planned to take care of them. Wherever you are in California, we can do this work together.

California already has one for you. It’s called the Probate Code, and it’s the default outcome for anyone who doesn’t write their own plan. Intestate succession decides who inherits — in a strict order: spouse first, then children, then parents, siblings, and outward. The court decides who raises your minor children. If no one suitable steps forward, a public administrator may be appointed to handle your estate. None of those defaults were designed for your family. They were designed as a tiebreaker for the state’s plan. They don’t account for the stepchild who’s really your kid, the partner you never legally married, the sibling you haven’t spoken to in twenty years, the chosen family who showed up when blood relatives didn’t, or the friend you’d trust with your life over anyone on a family tree. If those distinctions matter to you, the only way to make them stick is to put them in writing while you can.

Yes — and this is actually the part of estate planning that protects you while you’re alive, which most people don’t realize until it’s too late. A durable power of attorney covers financial decisions: paying bills, managing accounts, handling property, working with the IRS. An advance health care directive covers medical decisions and end-of-life wishes. Together, they let the people you’ve chosen step in quietly, with authority, on day one of a crisis. Without them, your family has to petition the court to be appointed as your conservator — a process that’s expensive, public, and almost always happens during the worst week of someone’s life. This matters especially if your legal “next of kin” isn’t who you’d actually want making the call. Unmarried partners, chosen family, estranged-from-family folks, and friend-families run into this constantly, and it’s almost entirely preventable with the right paperwork in place before you need it. Yes, and it’s an important part of planning ahead. You can choose someone you trust to make decisions for you if you’re unable to do so. This covers both medical choices and financial matters, depending on how you set it up.