You signed your trust years ago. You have the binder. You did the responsible thing, and you have not thought much about it since.
That is the part that worries me.
In 35 years of practice here in the West Valley, the single most common failure I see is not a badly drafted trust. It is a trust that was signed and then never fully funded. Funding a trust simply means changing the title on your assets so the trust actually owns them. Signing the document creates an empty container. Funding is what puts your property inside it.
A revocable living trust only controls what has been transferred into it. Anything left in your individual name at death, above California’s $208,850 small-estate threshold, can still go through probate, no matter what your trust says. And in a place like Woodland Hills or Calabasas, where a single home clears that threshold on its own, the assets left behind are rarely small.
Here are the three that families forget most often.
1. The house, after a refinance
Most people are surprised to hear that the family home is the asset that most often falls out of the trust. Not because it was never put in. Because it quietly came back out.
When I set up a plan, my office drafts and records a new grant deed transferring the home into the living trust. That part usually gets done correctly. The problem shows up years later. A family refinances the mortgage, and the lender requires the property to be held in their individual names to close the loan. That is normal. What is supposed to happen next is that the home gets transferred back into the trust once escrow closes. Very often, it never does.
Years pass. Nobody remembers. At death, the deed shows the house owned by two individuals, not by the trust, and the family is headed to court over the largest asset they own. If your home has been refinanced since you set up your trust, this is the first thing to check.
2. Bank and brokerage accounts opened after the trust was signed
Proper trust funding includes retitling your financial accounts into the name of the trust. Often the accounts that existed when the trust was created get handled, and then life moves on. You open a new brokerage account. You switch banks. You roll over an account into a new institution. Each new account starts life in your individual name, and unless someone deliberately retitles it or adds the trust, it stays that way.
A trust that was fully funded in 2015 can be badly underfunded by 2026 simply because a decade of new accounts were never brought in. This is worth reviewing any time you change financial institutions, because an account left in your individual name is exactly the kind of asset that ends up in trust administration or probate after a death.
One important note. Retirement accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s are different. You generally do not retitle those into a trust, because doing so can trigger unwanted income tax consequences. They pass by beneficiary designation instead. The mistake families make with retirement accounts is not funding, it is outdated or missing beneficiary designations, which is its own conversation.
3. Business interests, LLCs, and partnership shares
If you own rental property through an LLC, hold an interest in a family business, or are a partner in an investment entity, that ownership interest is an asset too. It should be assigned into your trust the same way your home and accounts are.
This one gets forgotten because it feels abstract. There is no deed to record and no bank to call. But a membership interest in an LLC held in your individual name at death is a probate asset, even if the LLC itself is running smoothly. For West Valley families who hold rental property in LLCs, this is a common gap, and coordinating the LLC with the trust is part of the asset protection planning that determines whether a plan actually works.
Key Takeaways
- A trust only controls the assets that have actually been transferred into it. Signing the document is not the same as funding it.
- Assets left in your individual name at death, above California’s $208,850 small-estate threshold, can still go through probate.
- The family home often falls out of the trust after a refinance and is never transferred back.
- Bank and brokerage accounts opened after the trust was signed are frequently never retitled.
- LLC and business interests are probate assets too, and are easy to overlook because there is no deed or account to update.
- Retirement accounts are the exception. They pass by beneficiary designation, not by retitling into the trust.
How to find out where your trust actually stands
You do not have to guess. Pull up how your home is titled with the County Recorder, check the registration on your major accounts, and look at how your business interests are held. If any of them are in your individual name rather than your trust, there is a gap.
This is the review I do with families all the time, and it is usually more reassuring than people expect. Sometimes everything is in order. Sometimes we find one asset that quietly slipped out after a refinance, and we fix it before it becomes a problem for the next generation.
If you have a binder on the shelf and you are not certain everything inside it was ever funded, that is worth sorting out before it becomes the next generation’s problem. Book a call and we will go through it together.