08/31/2026
Probate, for anyone who has not sat through one, is the court process that moves a house from a parent’s name to the kids’ names after death, and in California it typically runs 12 to 18 months. The fee formula gets the headlines, but the months are what families actually live through.
Think of two siblings, one in Petaluma and one out of state, who inherited their mother’s Santa Rosa house through her will. I’m describing an anonymized composite here, drawn from many families rather than any one client. The will was valid and nobody contested it. The court still had to supervise the transfer, because a will is a set of instructions for the probate court, not a way around it. So for fourteen months the house sat in a court file while the bills kept their own schedule: property taxes came due in December and April, the homeowner’s insurance had to be rewritten as a vacant-home policy at a higher premium, and the utilities stayed on so the pipes and the landscaping would not fail. None of it could be paid from the sale of the house, because the house could not be sold outside the court’s process. The siblings covered the carrying costs out of their own pockets while they waited. Then, at the end, came the statutory fees, roughly $34,000 on a $700,000 home under the formula in Probate Code section 10810, before either of them saw a dollar of what their mother left.
A living trust runs the same handoff privately. A trust is a legal container you create while you’re alive: the house sits inside it, you stay in complete control, you can sell or refinance exactly as you do now, and at your death the person you named can manage, rent, or sell the house within weeks, with no court file opened and no fourteen months of bills piling up on a frozen asset.
The will decides who gets the house. What a trust decides is how long they wait and what the waiting costs.
This is education, not legal advice.
Brett Rhodes Esq., Rhodes Law
