I'm the successor trustee of my parents' trust. What do I have to do?

Send the required notice to beneficiaries and heirs, gather and value assets, keep records, handle the house and taxes, then distribute and account. Ruben guides trustees from the first notice to the final distribution.

The fountain at Hillcrest Park in Fullerton

Fullerton, from where I sit

Q: Is a will enough for a house in Fullerton?

No. A will tells the probate court what you wanted; it does not keep your family out of court. A revocable living trust does. Ruben writes the trust, records the deed into it, and matches your accounts and beneficiary forms to the plan.

Q: Can I keep my mother's low property-tax base on her Fullerton house?

Possibly. Under Proposition 19 the assessed value carries to a child only for the parent's primary residence, only if the child moves in within the allowed time, and only up to a value limit. Renting it out resets the taxes.

The fountain at Hillcrest Park, Fullerton.
Photo: Stopsandstations, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Sunday, a little after seven, the Pinewood Stairs at Hillcrest Park. Four hundred and sixty-seven timber steps up the hill from Lions Field, with three little decks along the way where you can pretend you stopped for the view. My wife takes them at a pace I do not try to match. I take them with a daughter on my shoulders, which counts double. At the top the whole north end of Fullerton is laid out in the early light: the older streets around downtown, the Craftsman roofs, the long rows of fifties houses running west.

Fullerton is personal for me. I spent a lot of late nights at Fullerton College, in the buildings on East Chapman that the WPA put up in the 1930s, the ones with the Spanish and Moorish details and the quad in the middle. That campus is where a counselor’s “too difficult” turned into a motto I still live by. Nothing worth having is ever easy. I still drive past it and feel something.

After the stairs we go downtown. The 1930 Santa Fe depot on Santa Fe Avenue, with its tile roof and balcony, where the girls wait for a train to come through, and one always does. Then the Downtown Plaza on Wilshire, where on Thursday evenings in season the night market fills the block with food and music, and on a Sunday morning it is just us and the pigeons.

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

The Muckenthaler mansion in Fullerton — *The Muckenthaler, Fullerton.*
Photo: Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The houses

A man on a ladder painting the porch trim of a Craftsman bungalow with children's chalk drawings on the walk — *Ten years of weekends into the house, and nothing written down.*
Photos on this page are illustrations and do not show actual clients.

Fullerton has old housing stock, and that is exactly why so many of my conversations here are between generations. The parents bought in the sixties or seventies, a three-bedroom on a street with real trees, and stayed. The mortgage has been gone for twenty years. The house is now worth a number nobody says out loud at dinner. The children grew up in it, moved to Riverside or Texas or two miles away, and have never seen the deed.

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There is a second Fullerton family too: the one that bought a Craftsman or a Spanish bungalow near downtown because they love old houses, and has spent ten years restoring it, and has a mortgage, two kids, and no plan at all beyond the next project.

Both families have the same blind spot. The house is the inheritance. The house is the plan. And the house, in most cases, is still titled in a person’s name rather than a trust’s, which means the plan runs through a courthouse in Costa Mesa before it runs through the family.

What Fullerton families ask me

A woman sorting envelopes and statements into piles at a dining table in early morning light — *The first weeks of being the one named.*

Is a will enough for a house in Fullerton?

It isn’t.

A will tells the probate court what you wanted. It does not keep your family out of that court. A revocable living trust does, because the trust owns the house and your successor trustee can transfer it without a judge. I would write the trust, record a new deed moving the house into it, and check that your accounts and beneficiary forms match, so nothing gets left outside the plan.

My father died without a trust. How long does probate take in Orange County?

Longer than anyone wants. A California probate at Orange County Superior Court, which hears probate at the Costa Mesa Justice Complex usually runs many months from the first petition to the order that lets you distribute. There is a hearing to appoint the executor or personal representative, a formal inventory and appraisal, a waiting period for creditors, and a final accounting. I would file the petition, calendar every deadline, and tell you honestly at each stage what is next and why.

My mom’s old house has a 1972 property-tax base. Can I keep it when she passes?

Possibly, but the rules under Proposition 19 are narrow. The low assessed value can carry to a child only for the parent’s primary residence, only if the child moves in and makes it their own primary residence within the time the law allows, and only up to a limit on how much the value has grown. If you plan to rent it out, the taxes reset. I would run your family’s facts against those rules and build the plan around the real answer.

I’m the successor trustee of my parents’ trust. What do I actually have to do?

Being named trustee is an honor and a job. In the first weeks you send a legally required notice to every beneficiary and heir, gather and value the assets, keep careful records, and deal with the house and any taxes. Then you distribute according to the trust and account for every dollar. I guide trustees from that first notice to the final distribution, and I help the beneficiaries understand what they are owed and when.

How it works from here

Your first and second consultations are free, by video or phone. I listen first. Then I send a short list of what to gather: the deed to the Fullerton house, mortgage and account statements, and the names of the people you trust to step in for you.

I draft everything and send it over for you to read at home. We change what needs changing. Then we sign and notarize, in person by appointment or with a mobile notary, and I record the deed that puts the house into the trust.

Most Fullerton families finish in a few weeks. The slow part is usually finding the deed, which is a good argument for having a binder in the first place.

When the family is home

A father with a folder in a doorway while his grown children watch a game on the couch — *The folder was ready. The game was on.*

The first Thanksgiving after the girls were born I did a head count at the table. Grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles. Every single adult assumed somebody else in the family had the paperwork handled. Not one of us did.

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I watch the same thing happen in Fullerton every year. The parents want to say it, and they have rehearsed it. The kids steer the conversation to football, because hearing it means picturing the house without them in it. Everyone leaves full and nobody leaves informed.

There is one question that gets around all of that, and it is about paperwork, not death.

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

It is a gift to ask it. A parent can answer with a drawer, a closet, a lawyer’s name. And if the honest answer is “nowhere yet,” the whole table now knows something it did not know an hour ago, which is more than most families manage over pie.

If someone in your family has just died

A woman locking the front door of a ranch house at dusk with mail under her arm — *This week: lock the house, collect the mail.*

This week: order several certified death certificates, lock the house, forward the mail, and look for a will or trust. Hold off on giving anything away, even a car to the grandson who was promised it.

This month: find the accounts, notify Social Security and any pension plan, and call me. If there is a trust, I walk the successor trustee through the notices, 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, and I handle the filings and deadlines so the family can grieve without carrying the paperwork.

Around town

The depots on Santa Fe Avenue

Fullerton grew up around the railroad, and the railroad is still downtown. The Santa Fe Depot went up in 1930, Spanish Colonial Revival, and, restored after 1991, it still does the job it was built for: Amtrak and Metrolink trains stop there every day. Families meet each other on that platform, and send each other off from it.

The old Union Pacific depot has already had two lives. It was moved to its present spot in July 1980, and today it holds a restaurant, so a lot of Fullerton birthdays, graduations and rehearsal dinners have happened inside a train station.

There is something steady about a building that gets saved instead of torn down. Somebody decided it was worth the trouble to keep. Families make that same decision about a house, a ring, a box of letters, and it goes better when the decision is written down while everyone can still talk about it.

Balboa: the Fun Zone and the ferry

For Fullerton families, the beach weekend often meant Balboa. The Fun Zone opened in 1936, and its Ferris wheel has been the thing children spot first ever since. The Balboa Pavilion is older still; it went up in 1905.

Then there is the ferry. The Balboa Island ferry carries three cars at a time, so the wait is part of the trip. Kids lean on the rail. A father explains, again, that the boat is not going to tip over.

These are small weekends, a short drive and a short boat ride, and they are the ones families remember longest. A grown child who cannot recall a single birthday present can still tell you which side of the ferry Grandpa liked to stand on.

Talk with Ruben

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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.

Four hundred and sixty-seven steps, and the view is worth every one of them. An estate plan is a shorter climb than that, and your family gets the view.