Four clocks start when a California trust settlor dies. One of them is nearly untollable.
Most of these you start deliberately. The last one runs whether anyone does anything or not.
Notes from the Hill
The things people get wrong, and the rule that settles it.
Not tips. Not market cheerleading. Each of these is one specific mistake I keep seeing in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz County — a misread deadline, a tax that works differently than everyone assumes, a rule of thumb that is off by six figures — and the statute, regulation or agency example that actually decides it.
The capital gains exclusion has not changed since 1997. Your house has.
It was written for a housing market that no longer exists, and Congress has never touched the number.
You inherited a home in the City of Santa Cruz. You are not exempt from Measure C.
The exemption everyone quotes is real. It just does not cover the transaction you are actually about to do.
In Santa Clara County the seller customarily pays all three. That is unusual.
It is the most seller-heavy allocation in the Bay Area, it is not written down anywhere binding, and it is negotiable.
In San Jose, one dollar of extra price can cost $17,250.
Measure E is not a marginal tax. Cross the threshold and the rate applies to the whole price, from the first dollar.
Two clocks run on an inherited California home. Only one of them is fatal.
Miss the first and the exclusion is gone entirely. Miss the second and you lose some back-dating. They get treated as one deadline constantly.
“Equal or lesser value” does not mean what almost everyone thinks.
Two misreadings of this rule cost real money. One of them was on my own site until a review caught it.
Buying before you sell costs you twice, and nobody refunds the difference.
The sequencing decision looks like a logistics question. It is a tax question, and it is usually the expensive one.
The first overbid on a $1,000,000 probate sale is $1,050,500.
Two things about court confirmation get repeated constantly and are both wrong: the formula, and the idea that the bidding increments are fixed by law.
If your plan still says the estate exclusion halves in 2026, it is out of date.
A great deal of planning content was written against a deadline that no longer exists.
How you hold title decides whether the basis steps up fully or halfway.
It is one line on a deed, and for a long-held California home it can be the largest single number in the whole transaction.
There is a form due 150 days after a death, and missing it is not what triggers the penalty.
The deadline and the penalty are two different things, and the real exposure is neither of them.
The long-form versions
These notes are the sharp edges. The full walkthroughs — Prop 19, trust and estate sales, who pays what at closing, and the calculators that run your own numbers — live on their own pages.
Why this list is short
Every post here corrects something specific and cites the rule that settles it. If I can’t do that, I don’t write it. You can find “10 tips for sellers” anywhere; you can’t find the second half of the Measure C inheritance rule anywhere.
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