The lake at Carbon Canyon Regional Park, Brea.
Photo: MorbidEntree, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons

Saturday morning, the redwood grove at Carbon Canyon Regional Park. The girls run ahead on the path and then stop, because the trees do that to you. A couple hundred coast redwoods, planted in 1975 from seeds a local bank handed out to people opening accounts, standing in a dry canyon at the east edge of Brea where nothing that tall has any business growing. My wife takes the pictures. I carry the water, and later the younger one, when her legs quit before her opinions do.

On the drive back down Carbon Canyon Road you pass through Brea’s whole history in about four minutes. The hills where the oil camps were. The streets near the old downtown that Union Oil laid out for its workers’ houses. The 1950s tracts that replaced the orange groves. The cul-de-sacs from the seventies and eighties that went up with the mall and the 57. Then the new master-planned neighborhoods, two thousand homes in a decade. Every one of those houses belongs to somebody, and most will belong to somebody’s children before long.

By ten we are on Birch Street. The Promenade is quiet that early, chairs still stacked, a few other families doing what we are doing. The girls want a pastry. I want coffee.

I’m Ruben J. Martinez, an estate planning attorney licensed in California and Ohio. I work with Brea families by video, by phone, and in person by appointment.

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The houses

The Brea families I talk with tend to own one of three things. A ranch house on one of the older streets, bought by a parent decades ago when the groves were still coming out, paid off for years, now worth more than anyone in the family ever expected to see. A seventies two-story in one of the tracts east of the freeway, bought by a couple who are now grandparents and are starting to ask what happens to it. Or a newer home in one of the master-planned neighborhoods, with a mortgage, two kids, and a vague sense that the paperwork can wait.

Here is what those three families have in common. The house is the plan. It is the inheritance, the retirement, the thing everyone is quietly counting on. And in most of those houses, the deed still has a person’s name on it, not a trust’s.

That is the whole problem, and it is fixable. A paid-off house in a parent’s own name goes to probate court when that parent dies. The same house in a living trust goes to the children without a judge. Same house. Different piece of paper.

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What Brea families ask me

Do I need a living trust if I own a house in Brea?

If you own a home here, yes. A will does not keep your family out of probate. A trust does. Brea home values mean almost any house in the city puts an estate past the point where the small-estate shortcuts apply. I would draft a revocable living trust, deed the house into it, make sure the accounts and beneficiary designations line up with it, and hand you a binder your family can actually find.

My mother died and her Brea house is in her name. What happens now?

Her estate goes through probate at Orange County Superior Court, which hears probate at the Costa Mesa Justice Complex. That means a petition, notices to everyone with an interest, an inventory and appraisal, creditor claims, and a final order months later. It is public and it is slow. I would file the petition, handle every deadline, and keep you informed in plain language so the family can deal with the house and each other instead of the court.

Can my kids keep the property-tax base on our house?

Sometimes, and the rules tightened considerably under Proposition 19. In general, a child can keep a parent’s low assessed value only on the parent’s primary home, only if the child moves in and makes it their own primary home within a set time, and only up to a limit on the increase in value. A rental or a second home no longer qualifies. I would look at your specific house and your children’s plans and tell you plainly what the tax outcome will be.

Dad set up a trust years ago but never put the house in it. Is the trust worthless?

No. California lets a successor trustee file a Heggstad petition asking the court to confirm the house belongs to the trust, if the paperwork shows that was the intent. It is faster and cheaper than a full probate. I would review the trust, the schedule of assets, and the deed, and if the evidence is there, I would file the petition and get the house where your father meant it to be.

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How it works from here

Your first and second consultations are free, by video or phone. We talk about your family, your house, and what you want to happen. Then I send a short list of what to gather: the deed, a recent mortgage statement, account names, who you trust to step in.

I draft the documents and send them for review. You read them at your own kitchen table. We fix anything that is not right. Then we sign and notarize, by appointment in person or through a mobile notary, and I record the deed that moves the house into the trust.

For most Brea families, start to finish is a matter of weeks, not months. The slowest part is usually finding the deed.

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When the family is home

The first Thanksgiving after the girls were born, I looked around the table at every grown-up in my family and realized something. Each of us assumed somebody else had the paperwork. Nobody did.

I see it in Brea families every November. The parents want to say it. They have been meaning to for years. The children do not want to hear it, because hearing it means picturing the chair empty. So the pie comes out and the subject goes back in the drawer for another year.

Here is the sentence that opens it, and it is not about dying. It is about finding things.

“Mom, if something happened, where would we even look?”

That question is a gift. It lets a parent answer with a place instead of a feeling. The blue folder in the hall closet. The bottom drawer of the desk. And if the answer is “I don’t know,” that is useful too, because now the whole table knows what the next step is.

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If someone in your family has just died

This week: get several certified copies of the death certificate, secure the house and the mail, and find the will or trust if there is one. Do not start distributing anything yet, even to people who are entitled to it.

This month: locate the accounts, notify Social Security and any pension, and call me. If there is a trust, I help the successor trustee with the notices the law requires, the inventory, and the distribution. If there is no trust, I file the probate petition at Orange County Superior Court, Probate, at the Costa Mesa Justice Complex. Either way, I handle the filings and the deadlines so the family can grieve without carrying the paperwork.

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Around town

The Fourth of July in City Hall Park

Every Fourth of July, Brea spends the morning in City Hall Park. The Country Fair has been held there since about 1980; the city counted its 41st in 2021. It opens with a pancake breakfast. Then come the kiddie parade and the dog parade, a car show, and the Lions Club’s pie-eating and hula-hoop contests. There is a Beautiful Baby Contest, judged by people braver than I am. And the Plunge is free that day.

A fair that has run more than forty years has had time to turn over. Children who marched in the kiddie parade come back pushing strollers. Parents who once ran a booth sit in folding chairs and watch their grandchildren run the same lawn. Nobody plans that part. It just keeps happening, the same park, the same morning, every July.

That is most of what a family plan is for: keeping the people who show up on that lawn together after the paperwork is done.

Up the mountain to Lake Arrowhead

Ask a Brea family where they went when they finally got a weekend, and Lake Arrowhead comes up early. It has had a long time to become a habit. The village dates to 1924, the same year the Blue Jay boat began carrying people across the water. After the Second World War the Arrowhead Queen took over the tours, and in 1955 Santa’s Village opened in the pines nearby, which gave a generation of children a fixed opinion about where December should be spent.

What families bring down the mountain is rarely the souvenir. It is the cabin they rented two summers in a row, the photo at the boat rail, the story about the year it snowed on the drive up and Dad would not put the chains on. Those weekends become the family’s shared memory, the thing the grown children still bring up at the table.

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Talk with Ruben

California: (909) 375-3377. Ohio: (330) 960-6084. Your first and second consultations are free, by video or phone, and I meet in person by appointment.

Mailing address in Brea, California.

Next time you are standing under the redwoods at Carbon Canyon, think of it this way: somebody planted those trees in 1975 for people they would never meet. That is all an estate plan is.

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More from Ruben: estate planning, uncontested probate and trust administration · why a living trust matters if you own a home · Also serving La Habra, Fullerton.