How often should you update your estate plan? As a general rule, you should review it every three to five years and update it promptly whenever a significant change occurs in your family, your finances, or the law.
The Three-to-Five Year Rule
Even when your life feels stable, the world around your estate plan keeps changing. Tax laws shift. The people you named as trustees or executors grow older, relocate, or become less suited to the role. Assets you once owned may have been sold, and new ones may not yet be reflected in your documents.
Your estate plan requires routine maintenance to keep it fully effective and ready for when life happens. A quick annual check-in is enough to confirm that the important details in your plan still make sense. A deeper review every three to five years allows you to address everything fully.
Family Changes That Demand Prompt Action
Marriage is one of the most common reasons to revisit your documents. When you marry, you may want to add your spouse as a beneficiary, update your will to reflect their inheritance, and name them in key roles such as healthcare proxy or financial agent.
In California, where community property rules affect how assets are owned and titled, marriage makes an update even more urgent.
Divorce works in the opposite direction, and the stakes are just as high. A former spouse may remain named as a beneficiary on a retirement account and still inherit those assets, regardless of what your will says. Updating both your estate planning documents and your beneficiary designations is essential after any dissolution of marriage.
The birth of a child or grandchild is another clear trigger. You will need to name a guardian for minor children, adjust inheritance provisions, and potentially establish a trust to manage assets until they reach an appropriate age. Waiting too long after a child is born leaves a undesirable gap in your plan.
When the People in Your Plan Change
An estate plan is only as strong as the people named to carry it out. Trustees, executors, agents under a power of attorney, and healthcare proxies all need to be available, willing, and capable at the time they are needed.
If a named healthcare agent has passed away or become unavailable, your documents no longer accomplish what you intended. As relationships evolve, the trustee who made sense when your children were young may not be the right fit once your estate has grown more complex.
Reviewing those designations regularly is just as important as reviewing the documents themselves.
Financial Changes That Affect Your Plan
Buying a new home or investment property, or selling property you previously planned to pass on, should trigger an update to your will or trust. Proper titling ensures your assets align with your estate goals.
Starting or selling a business, receiving an inheritance, or experiencing a major shift in your overall wealth all affect how your plan should be structured. An estate plan written when your net worth was modest may not serve you nearly as well after significant growth.
Changes in the Law May Affect Your Plan
California’s legal landscape has changed in meaningful ways recently, and some of those changes affect estate plans directly.
As of January 1, 2026, California’s Medi-Cal program reinstated asset limits for long-term care eligibility. The California Department of Health Care Services set the countable asset limit at $130,000 for an individual and $195,000 for a married couple.
A 30-month lookback period for asset transfers also took effect on that date. If your estate plan was created during the period when those limits did not apply, it may not include the kind of Medi-Cal asset protection planning that is now essential for anyone who could eventually need nursing home care.
The federal estate tax exemption currently stands at $15 million per individual, made permanent under legislation passed in 2025. That change resolved years of uncertainty. If your plan included strategies built around a much lower exemption, it may contain provisions that no longer serve their original purpose and could create unnecessary complications.
California’s Proposition 19 limits the property tax benefits available when real estate passes to children. Older plans that assumed broad reassessment protections for inherited property may no longer work as intended. Reviewing how your real estate is titled and how it will transfer is an important part of any comprehensive review for California families.
What a Review Involves
Updating your estate plan does not mean starting over. Most reviews involve a focused conversation with your estate planning attorney to confirm that your documents still reflect your current wishes, that all assets are properly titled in the name of your trust, and that beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance policies are consistent with your overall plan.
Older estate plans often include tax provisions that made sense when they were drafted but no longer provide their intended benefit under current law. Catching and fixing those issues in a scheduled review is far better than discovering them after a death or a period of incapacity.
Your estate plan is a living document that requires routine maintenance. Arranging for regular reviews is the best way to make sure your wishes are honored when it matters most.
Let’s Get Started!
If you have an existing estate plan that has not been reviewed, now is the time for action. If you do not yet have an estate plan, we can provide the help you need to create one, so that your loved ones will have this trusted resource to guide them when life happens.
You can call us at 408-356-9200 to schedule a consultation at our Campbell, CA estate planning office, and you can use our contact form if you would like to send us a message.
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