Completing an estate plan is a real accomplishment. You found an attorney, worked through the questions you had been putting off, made a series of important decisions, and signed your documents. The binder is on the shelf, and the relief that comes with it is well earned.
But there is a question most families are never asked after that day: is your plan still accurate today? For many people, the honest answer is no, and they often do not discover it until the moment the plan is needed. In this post, we would like to answer some of the questions we commonly get asked. We’ll explain the difference between a plan that is signed and a plan that is current, why that gap tends to open up, and what it takes to keep a plan working over the years you will rely on it.
Does a finished estate plan ever need to be updated?
Yes. A signed estate plan reflects your life and the law as it stood on the day you signed it, and both of those things continue to change over time.
An estate plan is not a contract you complete once and file away. It is a set of instructions that has to match two things that keep moving: your family’s circumstances and California law. On the day you sign, those instructions fit your situation precisely. The difficulty is that signing day captures a single moment, while your life continues to change around it.
Estate plans do not expire on a particular date, so there is rarely an obvious signal that something needs attention. Instead, a plan gradually falls out of alignment with the life it was written for and with the laws and benefit rules that may have changed along the way. This kind of slow drift is harder to notice than an outright failure, because nothing appears to be wrong until someone actually needs the plan to work.
Why do estate plans fall out of date?
Estate plans typically fall out of date for two reasons: changes in your life and family, and changes in the law that governs the plan.
In practice, that happens in three main ways.
Your family and circumstances change. Over the years, the people and details in your plan shift. A child marries or divorces. A grandchild is born. Someone you named as successor trustee moves out of state, becomes ill, or is simply no longer the right person for the role. Any one of these developments can conflict with what your documents currently say.
Your assets change. This is the most common gap we see, and also the most preventable. A trust only controls the assets that have actually been placed into it or directed to it. If you buy a new property or open a new account and never properly connected the asset to your trust, it can pass through probate regardless of how carefully the trust itself was written. A well-drafted trust that never has the right assets transferred into it is a problem that often goes unnoticed until it matters.
The law changes. Changes in the law happen without any notice to you, and they can affect what your plan needs to do. This is one of the reasons it helps to have a regular point of contact who can explain new developments and what they mean for your specific plan. This is what we provide through our blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, and (for our clients) our Trust Maintenance Program.
How does the 2026 Medi-Cal change affect existing estate plans?
As of January 1, 2026, California reinstated the Medi-Cal asset limit at $130,000 for an individual and $195,000 for a couple, following a two-year period with no asset limit in place.
This change could affect many families who were not actively focused on public benefits planning. During 2024 and 2025, many people made long-term care, savings, and estate planning decisions under rules that imposed no Medi-Cal asset limit. With the asset limits now reinstated, plans and financial arrangements that once posed no concern could unexpectedly affect future Medi-Cal eligibility and may require families to reevaluate their long-term financial and care planning strategies.
If your plan was built around the assumption that assets would not be counted, that assumption is now outdated. For families who have a child or other family member relying on public benefits, the stakes are higher still, because appropriate planning preserves access to those benefits while outdated planning can put them at risk. This is precisely the kind of change that can occur quietly in the years between your signing day and the day your plan is called upon to work.
It is worth stating plainly: a development like this is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to review your plan. The families who are caught off guard tend to be the ones who assumed that finishing a plan once meant it was finished for good.
How often should you review your estate plan?
As a general rule, review your estate plan every one to two years, and also after any major life event such as a marriage, divorce, birth, death, significant purchase, or move.
A helpful comparison is an annual physical. Most people accept the value of a yearly checkup or a regular screening: you go before anything is wrong, specifically so that any problems are caught early. An estate plan benefits from the same approach. A short, regular review is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is how you keep something from going wrong in the first place.
The events that should always prompt a review include:
- A marriage or divorce, whether yours or a beneficiary’s
- A birth, adoption, or death in the family
- Buying, selling, or refinancing real estate
- Opening or closing significant financial accounts
- A change in the circumstances of a successor trustee or guardian
- A move to or from California
- A significant change in the law, such as the 2026 Medi-Cal asset limit revision
If any of these have occurred since you signed your documents, your plan is worth another look – not because it has failed, but because it may no longer achieve the goals and protections that matter most to you today.
What does it mean to fund a trust, and why does it matter?
Funding a trust means making sure your assets are properly connected to it, either by retitling them into the trust’s name or by directing them to the trust through beneficiary designations. A trust can only control the assets that have been connected to it in one of these ways.
Funding is the single most overlooked step in estate planning, and it is not a one-time task. The way an asset is connected to your trust depends on the type of asset, and getting this right is essential.
Assets that are retitled into the trust. Real estate, bank accounts, and non-retirement investment accounts are generally transferred so that the trust becomes the owner. For these assets, the goal is to make sure the title is actually in the name of the trust.
Assets that are connected through beneficiary designations. Retirement accounts such as a 401(k) or IRA are not retitled into a living trust, because changing ownership of those accounts during your lifetime can trigger immediate income tax. Instead, these accounts remain in your name, and the trust is often connected by naming it as a beneficiary (when that is appropriate for your situation). Life insurance is handled the same way, through its beneficiary designation. Because these assets pass outside the trust, their beneficiary designations have to be coordinated with the rest of your plan deliberately.
A plan that was fully funded on or shortly after signing day can gradually come out of alignment over years of ordinary life, as new accounts are opened and designations are changed. Keeping everything properly connected is ongoing work, which is exactly why a plan is best treated as something you maintain rather than something you complete once.
Whose job is it to keep a plan current?
Without a system in place, the responsibility falls to you to remember, and ordinary life makes that easy to overlook. Closing that gap is the purpose of an ongoing maintenance relationship.
Consider how most plans are set up. You sign your documents, you return to daily life, and the arrangement quietly assumes that you will contact your attorney whenever something changes. The trouble is that most people do not realize a particular change is significant until it has already become a problem. When you open a new brokerage account, your attention is on the account itself, not on whether it needs to be connected to your trust.
There is also a less obvious issue. The attorney who originally drafted your plan may have retired by the time the plan is actually needed, sometimes decades later. A plan that rests on a single individual, without a team or an ongoing relationship behind it, can leave your family in a difficult position at the worst possible moment.
This is why we view estate planning as a relationship rather than a one-time transaction. The work does not end at the signing table. It moves into a different phase of review, adjustment, and keeping every asset properly connected as your life continues to change.
How Cookman Law approaches ongoing maintenance
For our clients, this is the role our Trust Maintenance Program is designed to fill. It is the structured version of everything described above: a regular review of the key terms in your documents, a check that your assets are still properly connected to your trust, attention to the beneficiary designations that operate outside your trust, and quarterly Office Hours in which we walk clients through legal changes, explain how those changes might affect them, and answer their questions. We also provide an online vault through Dani Plan to help our members keep not only their estate planning documents safe and accessible, but details throughout the other areas of their lives – everything from medical information and care team access to online login credentials.
All of this is supported by an ongoing relationship with a full team, so that the responsibility for catching changes does not rest solely on you remembering to call.
No matter how you choose to maintain your plan, the families who do best are those who treat their estate plan as a living document and review it on a regular basis.
We’re here to help
If it has been a year or more since anyone reviewed your plan, or if you have had a major life change, purchased property, or are wondering how recent legal changes may affect you, it may be time for a review. Not because something is wrong, but because your plan should still say what you would want it to say.
You do not have to determine on your own whether your plan is still working. That is what we are here for.
