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Patton Law Group
Meet Rachel Patton
I grew up on a ranch. I grew up with 12 acres. I grew up with horses and I think pigs and chickens and goats, and we had all the animals, dogs, cats, more cats than I could keep track of. Yeah, I grew up riding and I fell in love with barrel racing, and so I started doing that. It was fun. It’s a thrill and it’s a challenge to learn how to do it right. I think that contributed a lot to who I am as a person and who I am now. I love being outdoors. I love the connection that there is with animals and horses and any animal. I think there innocence like kids and they love us and rely on us and can do no harm. I love every aspect of that. I think that that obviously carries over into my personality because that’s how I treat people. I was always taught to treat others the way you want to be treated, to treat animals the way that you would want a person to treat you. That’s just how I approach life in general and how I approach people in general. I am a country girl. Oftentimes you’ll find me in my office in boots and jeans, sometimes a little dirty, but I have that work hard, play hard mentality and so I think that really just helps me to do the best that I can for people.
About Patton Law Group
My office is here in Roseville, which is the central hub in this area. We serve Placer County, Sacramento County, El Dorado County, all the counties around here. I live here nearby. I lived in Roseville for a while and I now live in the Loomis, Newcastle area. I’m a country girl, so I like to be outside and I go out to Folsom Lake a lot, so you might see me out there if you’re one of my clients; just in the area a lot. Where we are is a really easy to locate location. We are just down the street from the Galleria and the Fountains, which is a huge shopping hub for everybody, easy access. We’re a single story building, so you just walk right in. There’s no stairs involved. It’s not easy to get lost. We have all of the amenities to help people. We just try to make it easy basically for people to access us. I know the areas and so a lot of times I get clients, they live in Granite Bay, they live in Orangeville. I’m familiar with all of the areas. Different people have different needs, whether that’s kids or where I live, it’s a lot of animals, horses and goats and whatnot, and people want to make sure to pass on their pets appropriately and take care of them. Any situation that happens, we’re pretty prepared for it.
Estate Planning Overview
A typical estate plan consists of a revocable living trust, which is the primary document that dictates how everything goes as well as a number of other documents just to make sure everything works correctly no matter the situation. The thing that I think people don’t realize always is that when you need these documents to work, you can’t fix them. You either don’t have capacity or you’ve passed away, so they can’t be fixed. Everything has to be done right to begin with. We do a lot of documents. Sometimes you get a huge binder and you’re like, what is this all for, but it is very important. In addition to the trust, it comes with the pour-over will the backup document to make sure everything dumps into the will that might be left out. It comes with a certification of trust, which is great because it’s a small two page document or so that you can provide to financial institutions and title companies and whatnot to ensure that you have a trust in place without having to give a copy of your 60 page trust document. That’s none of their business. It comes with durable power of attorneys for finances, which is very important because that makes sure that you designate who can make decisions on your behalf if you become incapacitated and also avoids the court system and the need for a conservatorship, which is even worse than probate in my opinion. Thank you to Britney Spears for that. It also comes with healthcare directive, which dictates who can make healthcare decisions, medical decisions on your behalf, and expresses some of your preferences, which some people know as a living will; end of life decisions, organ donation, really anything healthcare related. It comes with a guardianship nomination if you have minor children to ensure that you state who the guardians of your children would be in the event that you cannot. Then it comes with a number of other documents really that work in conjunction with your trust so that it works the way that it should and it gives you the ability to do certain things without having to come back to an attorney; make sure that personal property items go to this person or to that person. Our estate plan in our office also comes with the deed to your home. We do the deed, we record it with the county, we get it transferred. The house is the biggest asset and the first thing that will go through probate, so it’s really important that that gets done. We take care of that. Then just depending on what you have, any other documents you might need, some people have small businesses, and so we want to assign the business interest to the trust. Some people we do community property agreements for to make sure that they get the tax benefits of living in a community property state because the IRS doesn’t really care about California law, and just a full complete estate plan to make sure, again, that there’s no holes because we need it to work.
Why Did You Choose to Practice Law?
I actually got into it because I dealt with some legal issues with my own family and it was a little bit of a disaster and I always felt like I wished that it had gone better and that someone had explained it better, so I decided that I wanted to do it and do it better. I actually worked in a law firm before I went to law school, so I’ve been doing this technically for over 20 years. I went to law school and knew right off the bat that this was what I was going to do, so I didn’t have to worry about learning any other types of law extensively. I just focused on estate planning. That’s what I do now is I really try to make it accessible to people and help them understand a process that can be really confusing and explain it in layman’s terms and talk to people in their own language and break things down.
Can I Make Changes To My Trust?
Once a trust is set up, it’s built to last. It’s built to change with the laws that change, and so it shouldn’t be that you have to make a change to it. I get a lot of people that come and talk to me and say, hey, this attorney told me I need to update my trust every two years. I don’t agree with that. You don’t need to update your trust unless you need to update your trust. It’s good to review it every few years and make sure that everything that you set in place is still the way you want, but you really only need to change it if something in your life changes. When that happens it’s not too hard to change your trust, it just depends on what you’re changing. Usually it can be a simple amendment or it can be – a lot of people will want to change their guardians but not their trust, and that’s a separate document, so we change that document. Once it’s set up, setting up the trust plan or setting up the estate plan is really the core document that you need, and then anything after that tends to be a lot more simple and straightforward because you already have the core document in place. You’re just making small changes to it; take this name out, replace it with that one, update this language. It’s a pretty straightforward process. Most of the time I get a lot of people that set up estate plans when their children are minors, and I usually tell them that I plan on seeing them at least one more time because there’s that change from, hey, we’re setting up this estate plan to care for our children, and now our children are at that age where they’re going to care for us, so we’re going to change our estate plan around to dictate that. That’s a common one. Other than that, it’s really easy to update an estate plan and it’s not commonly needed unless something in your life changes such that you need to make those changes.
What Services Does Patton Law Provide?
I do estate law, trust administration, and probate. That covers pretty much anything that has to do with estate planning, estate stuff after the fact basically, so everything before and after you die to prepare for it and to handle it when it happens; and tax law as it pertains to that too just because there are a lot of tax ramifications that go along with these types of things. It’s important to incorporate that into it. I do estate planning up to that point, including wills, trusts, power of attorney agents, all of that, and then after the fact trust administration, which is just helping people deal with being a trustee and dealing with a trust after a death, making sure everything is done right and the beneficiaries get what they need, which is less common because it’s pretty straightforward. Then probate, which is when obviously someone passes without having anything and it has to go through the court system; so everything from the beginning to the end and everything in between.
What is Probate?
Probate is not fun, I can tell you that much. It’s basically when you pass without a trust, when you have assets that have nowhere to go. That’s really what it is. If all you have is a bank account or an investment account and there’s beneficiaries on it, it goes to them. If you have assets that don’t have anywhere to go, such as a home or a bank account that doesn’t list anything or even brokerage accounts, investment retirement accounts – I’ve had people not have updated beneficiaries on them, so they have to go through probate, stocks, bonds, any of that stuff. Any assets that don’t have anywhere to go over the probate amount, which is about 185,000, have to go through probate in order to be distributed. There’s no other way to do that. If you’re under that amount, there’s ways to do it for the probate code, but over that amount you have to go through probate. The probate court is just a process. It’s a huge long process that you have to follow. There’s no shortcuts. You have to go through the motions. Basically you submit a petition, you decide who the executor’s going to be, and then you have to follow all the probate rules of doing inventories and notifying creditors and going to hearings and just there’s a timeline. In California, at best, you can get through a probate in nine months. I think that’s happened once in my life that I know of. It really just depends on how backed up the courts are. Some courts are a month or two out, some are six to nine months out, and so the assets are tied up until then. You can’t utilize them, you can’t protect them, you can’t do anything with them until that very first hearing where the court approves it. Then everything that you do is basically monitored by the court and has to go through court approval. On top of that, there are fees and the fees are statutorily set by law. They are a percentage of the gross value of your estate. If you have a $600,000 house with a $300,000 mortgage, it’s not based on the $300,000 equity, it’s based on the value of 600,000. That’s a percentage that is being eaten away from your inheritance that is not passing on. Then that fee can be doubled if the executor takes it. Then of course there’s all the court costs, the filing fees, and the now mandatory e-filing fees and publication fees and all the fees, so many fees. Really it is a way to pass on assets when they have nowhere to go. That is mandatory, that is costly and time consuming and just generally confusing to people, I think. I try to make it not confusing. I try to make it pretty straightforward, but it’s just a process. It’s just going through the motions and there’s no way around it.
Why Choose Patton Law Firm?
I think that having a small law firm, which is what I try to keep it, is important because it gives personalized service. I handle and touch and communicate with and advise on every single case in person that comes through this office. There’s nothing that happens that I am not aware of or involved in, in some way, shape, or form. I like to do things right and I like to take care of clients. I think that’s important because I can make sure that everything is being done right and that things aren’t being missed. I can tailor it personally to each person. A lot of things are similar, probates are similar, trusts are similar, but every person is different and every situation is different. We talk about our kids and how they’re a little different and what we want for them and our assets and our family and our culture, and I think that’s really important when drafting your estate plan. I think it’s important having an attorney that understands that because it’s important to make sure that your wishes and your thoughts and what you want to happen is transferred onto that paper, because again, once you pass, it can’t be changed. It can’t be fixed. It’s important to translate all of those things into your estate plan so that is the way that it’s going to work and the way that it’s communicated to the people that you leave behind. I think one of the most important things – I have gone to attorneys in my past life where – I’m not a dumb person, but I’ve walked out feeling like, what were they talking about? I have no idea what they were talking about. I don’t ever want anyone to walk out of my office feeling that way. It’s really, really important to me that when I explain things, I do it in a way that makes sense to people. I don’t talk like a lawyer most of the time. I talk like a normal person. I break things down. I draw a lot of pictures because I really like people to understand what they’re doing. Estate planning can be confusing, so it’s really important for me to break it down, to give people what they want and to do it in a way that they understand. That’s what we’re all about.
What Is A Will And Why Do I Need One?
It can be confusing sometimes. A lot of people will call for a will and we discuss the difference between a will and a trust, which a will is better than nothing in California. If you do fall into that category of owning a home or having minors, it doesn’t protect you from the court system. What happens is if you don’t have a will, then obviously everything goes through the court and it can be a mess and it goes the way that California dictates. If you do have a will, the will at least gets lodged with the probate court through the probate, and then your assets in theory are distributed the way that the will says. That’s better than nothing. If you don’t own a home or you don’t have minor kids, oftentimes a will can be sufficient to pass on your assets because if you don’t own a home, everything else has beneficiaries and so you really just need to make sure that the will covers anything that doesn’t. The normal will that you do when you don’t have a trust is typically called the last will and testament or something to that effect. When you have a trust in place, you still have a will, but it’s a moot document. It’s not one you ever want to have to use, but you want to have it in case you need it. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. It’s known as a pour-over will, and it’s really just a backup document that makes sure that in case anything is left out of your trust, it basically says, whoops, I left that out of my trust. Just pour it into my trust and dictate it the way my trust says. It is really important, but we want everything to be in the trust and we don’t want to use the will but we always do it just as a backup.
Revocable vs Irrevocable Trusts
A revocable trust or a revocable living trust is what most people have. It’s the most common type of trust. It’s what everyone and their mother has basically. That’s basically a way to transfer your assets upon death and leave you in complete control of everything during your lifetime. The benefit of that is that you can live your life the way that you do now. There’s no tax differences; there’s nothing you have to file differently; there’s nothing you have to do differently. You pretty much just keep living the life that you’re living and buying things and selling things and doing whatever you’re doing now, but it plans for what happens after you pass away. An irrevocable trust is a much more complex planning tool that is mostly used when people are above the estate tax exemption amount or they have very high liability and they want to protect their assets. It allows you to take the assets out of your estate for estate tax purposes and also protects it from creditors and whatnot. The offset to that is that you have to essentially give up control of your assets because that’s how you protect it. It is a complex planning tool that can be really beneficial in the right situations, but it’s less common.
How Can I Protect My Assets From My Ex?
Everybody’s worst nightmare is leaving their inheritance to a now ex, son or daughter-in-law. There are things to put in place and I actually commonly do it in my trust. Without going into too much detail, you can leave assets to your children in trust instead of outright, which basically tends to work the same way. They still have access to all of the funds, but it keeps it in a separate protected account. That way, as long as those funds are in that account, if they divorce in the future, it’s not considered community property. It’s separate property, so the spouse can’t get ahold of it. If someone gets in a car accident and sues them, that money can be protected from them. They can go after their personal assets, but not any assets in that trust fund for them. There are ways to do that to make sure that that doesn’t happen. Obviously there can be ways around that and sometimes people find them, but ultimately, if you can set up your estate plan to account for that and you can communicate that to your children, it’s a really, really good way of protecting assets and making sure that it’s passed on; not just protecting it from creditors or future divorcing spouses, but also making sure that it passes on the way that your estate plan says so that if your children don’t ever set up their own estate plan, yours will dictate, okay, well this goes to their kids or this goes to my other children. You’ve got all those backups in place to protect it as well in terms of where it’s going to go.
Isn't Estate Planning Primarily for the Elderly?
What I usually tell people most commonly is that if you own a home in California or you have minor kids, you need some kind of estate plan. Everyone, every single person needs at least a durable power of attorney for finances and for healthcare because if you can’t make decisions on your own, somebody’s got to make them for you. But because of the way that probate works here, if you own a home essentially or assets over 185,000 or so, your estate would have to go through the probate system. Automatically anybody that owns a house in California pretty much needs a trust to avoid the probate system. When you have minors, obviously you want to plan for that. The probate court will make you set up a trust for your minors anyway. I always say you might as well do it the way that you want to instead of the way the court wants. That way you can plan for protecting your assets, protecting them from your kids, protecting your kids from yourself and you can dictate how everything goes. There’s a lot of reasons to need a trust, but the most common one is that you own a house or you have property or you have minor kids, and so you need to make sure that it’s transferred adequately and without the court intervention, which is unnecessarily costly and time consuming.
How Does Moving Out of State Affect My Estate Plan?
It doesn’t in the sense that your trust is built to last. If you move out of state, it doesn’t make your trust invalid. It just means that it’s valid under California law, which just means that if there are any issues or when you pass away and the trust has to be administered, it is required to be administered according to California law and not the law in the state that you live in; which is not terrible because our probate law is horrible but our trust law is actually pretty good. It has a lot of good protections in there and a lot of good rules. You just have to make sure that your successor trustee understands that when they take over, they have to do what California law dictates and not the state that you’re in. Then if you make any updates to it, you just have to have a California licensed attorney doing it. If you do want to move it to the state that you’re in, you can always see an attorney in that state. When you update the trust, you can just update it to reflect that, that state law now dictates. There’s a lot of ways that you can handle that, but your trust is still valid if you move out.
How Can I Wisely Set Up My Estate Plan For a Blended Family?
Actually I can comment legally and personally because I’m in a blended family currently. It’s definitely made me understand some of the things that you want to do, protect your kids. Obviously you want to share your life with your spouse, but you still want to leave the assets that you worked hard for to your kids sometimes. There are ways to do that. There’s lots of different ways to do that. I always talk about the different ways with my clients because it’s really personal to how you want to do it. There’s no solid answer that applies to everybody. Sometimes people want to do AB trust, which is a way of dividing assets. Sometimes people want to leave assets immediately when they pass. Sometimes they want to do continuing trust. There’s so many ways to handle it, but it is very personal and it is a conversation that I haven’t explained because no two people are different when it comes to blended families. It is a very complex issue that doesn’t need to be complex. It just needs to be discussed and talked about so that it’s understood and then we can carry it out the way that you want to carry it.
How Can I Control Access to Trusts?
That’s where I really love continuing trusts. Again, not to get into too much detail, but I can tell you this is how I have my trust set up for my own kids is that basically when the assets are distributed, instead of distributing it outright to them, it’s distributed at a given age. Let’s say you pick age, I don’t know, 25. It means that up until age 25, all of the assets are completely accessible to the child for health, education, maintenance, support. It’s just that the child is not making the decision about what assets should be spent; your trustee is. It’s a best of both worlds situation. If you have some adult children that are over age 25, well they’ll have immediate access because they’re over age 25. They get to control all their trust funds. If you have any kids that are under age 25, the successor trustee will continue to manage those until each child attains age 25. It really is the best of both worlds.
Is Estate Planning Expensive?
It’s not expensive in terms of comparing it to what the cost would be of going through probate, because the probate fees are astronomical. I mean, the minimum probate you’re ever going to get away with I think would maybe be 10,000, but it’s commonly closer to 15,000 or more just given property prices and assets and whatnot and if the executor takes fees, double it. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of dollars. An estate plan is mere chump change compared to that, and you get to do it the way that you want. In my opinion, it’s not expensive. It’s not something that’s fun that anyone wants to spend money on. I’d rather spend money on going on vacation too, but it gives you peace of mind, and peace of mind that you get at the end of it is well worth the price for it, which is really minimal compared.
How Wealthy Do I Need To Be For An Estate Plan?
I absolutely do not think a person has to be rich. 99% of my clients are not rich. Again, because of the way that probate works in California, it’s different in other states. In California, one of the primary goals is to avoid the probate system. To be considered rich enough to need a trust, you need to be rich enough to own a house basically. I don’t mean outright. A lot of people will say, well, I don’t own my house, the bank does; well you, me, you, everybody. As long as you own a house though, as long as it’s yours, you’re not renting, you actually own a house, you’re rich enough to need a trust in my opinion.
