Practice area
Estate Planning
Estate planning built around your relationships, assets, and intentions – and designed to work in practice, not merely on paper.
Estate planning is more than preparing documents from instructions. Done well, it begins by understanding your circumstances and priorities – including those that may not yet seem important – and how the plan should respond as life, assets, relationships, and responsibilities change. It produces a plan not only for what is known today, but for likely unknowns.
Sound Decisions for Uncertain Conditions.
A comprehensive, trust-based plan
Estate planning is a process designed to help you manage your affairs when you become incapacitated or die. It includes seeing to the proper handling of your personal care and finances, while you are alive but incapacitated, and arranging for preservation and distribution of your property upon your death, in a manner that reflects your wishes and achieves important goals, such as providing for loved ones, minimizing taxes, and avoiding family disputes.
The firm has assisted thousands of clients with creating or updating their estate plans. Our standard estate plan is a comprehensive package structured around a revocable living trust, and also includes pour-over wills, durable powers of attorney for property, advance health care directives, and assistance with trust funding — transferring assets into your trust, so that trust assets can later bypass probate court administration.
Our main planning tools include…
Living Trusts
A revocable living trust lets you remain in control while you are able, provides for management if incapacity occurs, and allows properly funded trust assets to pass at death – typically without probate court proceedings.
- Retain control and flexibility during your lifetime
- Provide for management if incapacity occurs
- Transfer properly funded trust assets privately, without probate
Retirement Plan Trusts
Specialized trusts that protect IRAs and qualified retirement accounts as they pass to your beneficiaries — helping to preserve tax advantages and shield inherited assets.
- Preserve available income-tax deferral under complex distribution rules
- Provide creditor and spendthrift protection
- Coordinate IRAs with your overall plan
Irrevocable Trusts
Advanced planning tools for protecting assets, reducing estate-tax exposure, and providing for beneficiaries with specific needs.
- Asset protection and tax-efficient wealth transfer
- Provide for heirs while setting sensible guardrails
- Support charitable and legacy goals
Wills
A will typically directs the distribution of probate assets, can nominate guardians for minor children, and can be a “pour-over” will, directing probate assets to a trust – if not transferred to it during life – to be distributed under its terms.
- Direct distribution of probate assets
- Nominate guardians for minor children
- Serve as a coordinated backstop for trusts and beneficiary designations
Settlor Incapacity and Filling a Trust’s “Empty Chairs”
29 California Trusts & Estates Quarterly No. 4 (2023)
Bequeathing Bitcoin: Crypto for the Cryptee
IV Probate Department Newsletter No. I (2021)
Tips of the Trade: Pitfalls of Split-Interest Trusts for Blended Families
25 California Trusts & Estates Quarterly No. 4 (2019)
What a Complete Plan Often Includes
Revocable living trust
A foundation for avoiding probate, preserving privacy, and authorizing a trustee you choose to manage your affairs if you no longer can.
Pour-over will
A fallback document that directs probate assets into your trust at death.
Durable power of attorney
Authorizes a trusted agent to manage financial and property matters if you are unable to.
Advance health care directive
States your medical-treatment wishes, including end-of-life decisions, and names someone to make health care decisions if you cannot.
HIPAA authorization
Lets the people you choose receive medical information when needed.
Funding and beneficiary coordination
Helps ensure that asset titles and beneficiary designations support your plan.
Put a thoughtful plan in place.
Meet with Palm Desert Estate Planning to create an estate plan tailored to your assets, priorities, and those you care about.