Say 'I Do' to Easy Property Transfers: A Guide to Interspousal Transfer Deeds in California Buying or selling a home can be a complicated process, and if you're married, you may have to consider an Interspousal Transfer Deed. This legal document allows spouses to transfer property ownership between themselves, either as...
How to Transfer a Title of Real Estate in California: A Guide for Property Owners California is known for its unique real estate market, and transferring a real estate title in the state requires specific knowledge and understanding of the process. The transfer of a title means transferring ownership from one...
A Deed can seem like an insignificant document, but without it, you can’t buy or sell a property. In the following example, the buyer hadn’t recorded the Deed, and the title remained in the owner’s name for nearly two decades. Nearly 20 years later, an unrecorded Deed surfaces This case study comes...
One of our clients created her Living Trust some 12 years ago, and updating her Trust was a 2016 New Year’s resolution. The update was long overdue; since its creation, she’s invested in an IRA, a life insurance policy and some other brokerage accounts. She was going to wait until she...
This week we’re featuring a couple, Scott and Callista, who came in to our Oakland office initially to transfer title on several rather sizeable properties. Scott wanted to add his wife’s name to the title, making them co-owners; this is a fairly simple procedure, one that we can generally execute...
A client recently came in to our Walnut Creek office to prepare her Living Trust. She’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, and while both she and her doctors were optimistic about her long-term prognosis, the disease created a sense of urgency, causing her to think about her life, her priorities...
Probate, as we tell our clients, is easy to avoid by creating a Living Trust, making sure that it’s properly funded with your assets and updated with significant investments and life events. When you die without a Trust, your estate falls into court-appointed Probate, and it’s always a costly, lengthy...
A couple, John and Joan, came into our Walnut Creek office to change the vesting on a deed. Vesting is the manner in which you hold title to your real estate as reflected on your deed. Proper vesting is required every time you file a deed, and includes Sole Ownership, Joint...
A newly married couple came in to our Walnut Creek office to update their deed. Before their marriage, they had bought their home together as a single man and woman. When they married, the wife took her husband’s last name, but the name on the deed still reflected her maiden...
Real estate titles can be tricky indeed, as Stan learned after waiting for 16 years after his divorce to remove his ex-wife from the ownership records of his home and then adding his new wife to the deed 14 years after his re-marriage. Oh...
There were so many estate planning mistakes made in the scenario I wrote about in my last posting. First of all, it’s probably not wise to make an integral part of your planning the expectation that a child will always survive his or her parent. Sure, it’s a likely expectation,...
Legal documents can be extremely complicated, especially if you are unfamiliar with all the legal terms included in these documents. When you need to make changes to your home title for any reason, it is important to hire a document specialist from California Document Preparers, or CDP, to help you...
