“I want it to be a gathering place,” they say. “Somewhere the kids can come back to. Somewhere if someone’s struggling, they have a place to land. I want them to remember what it felt like when we were all together.”

I hear this a lot. And here’s what I’ve learned: they’re not really talking about a house. They’re talking about summer. Bare feet. Wet towels drying on the deck. Somebody in the kitchen making dinner. Kids running in and out. Friends stopping by. Maybe one too many glasses of wine. The sound a house makes when it’s full of people you actually want around.

That’s what they’re trying to save. The problem is, they think they can do it by saving a building.

They can’t. Buildings are terrible at keeping memories alive.

Clarksdale

I was thinking about this recently on a great American road trip through the Deep South. I stopped in Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of the famous Crossroads and once one of the beating hearts of the Mississippi Delta.

In 1940, the Delta produced an enormous share of America’s cotton. Clarksdale was money, commerce, activity. Banks, merchants, farmers, laborers—all revolving around the same economic machine. In 1930, the Bank of Clarksdale built a handsome neoclassical building downtown. It wasn’t foolish. Wasn’t some rich man’s monument. It was a perfectly sensible building for the world that existed outside its doors.

And then the world changed. Mechanical cotton pickers arrived. The labor system that supported the Delta began disappearing. The Great Migration carried people north—Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis—looking for opportunity. The economic world that had made Clarksdale prosperous changed profoundly.

The Bank of Clarksdale eventually disappeared as a financial institution.

But here’s where the story gets interesting.

Today the old bank is called simply The Bank. It’s an event venue now. Weddings, parties, gatherings. A building designed for deposits and withdrawals now holds celebrations. Hollywood even found a use for it—appeared in the film adaptation of The Help.

I rather like that. Someone built a bank in 1930 and nearly a century later people are having parties in it. The building survived precisely because nobody insisted that it remain a bank. Its original purpose disappeared, but instead of embalming the purpose, somebody found a new one. The building was allowed to become useful again.

Elsewhere in Clarksdale, I can see the other possibility. Old commercial buildings still stand with weathered brick and fading paint. The remnants of businesses whose customers and purposes packed up and left sometime around 1952. There’s something stubborn about an old building. It can stand there for decades refusing to acknowledge that the reason for its existence is gone.

Kyoto

Then my friends Robert and Monica told me a story. They’d been hiking the Kyoto Trail—seventy-three kilometers around Kyoto—when they came across an abandoned house on a hillside. Bamboo. Mountains. A river below. The sort of place that looks less constructed than painted there.

You can imagine the person who chose it: Here. This is where we’ll live. This is where the children will come. This is where we’ll grow old.

Except eventually no one lived there.

Much of rural Japan has been losing population for decades. Younger generations moved toward cities and economic opportunity. Houses that represented security, family, permanence—left behind. Robert and Monica wandered through this one and found a box.

Inside were porcelain bowls, carefully wrapped in old Japanese newspaper. One was beautiful: yellow and ochre, with great blue and white flowers painted across it. The rim irregular. Handmade. Personal. The sort of object somebody had chosen rather than merely acquired.

Someone had wrapped it carefully. That’s the detail I can’t get past.

They didn’t throw it in a cupboard. They wrapped it. Put it in a box. Protected it. At some point, that bowl mattered to somebody. Maybe it was used for rice. Maybe it came out when family visited. Maybe it was a wedding gift. We don’t know. That’s the point.

The people are gone. The story is gone. The house is empty. And now Robert has the bowl. A stranger from the other side of the world walked into somebody else’s dream house, opened a box, and became the next chapter in the life of an object that was supposed to belong to another family. There’s something both sad and wonderful about that.

The Problem With Permanence

Here’s where estate planning sometimes gets things backward. The owner of the beach house doesn’t really want to preserve the beach house. She wants to preserve what happened there. She wants her children to gather. She wants grandchildren to know one another. She wants someone who’s struggling to have a safe place to land. She wants generosity to continue after she’s gone.

Those are beautiful objectives. But somewhere along the way, the objective becomes confused with the real estate. And so we start writing rules.

Who gets July? Who gets August? Can spouses use it? What about grandchildren bringing friends? Who pays the property taxes? What happens when the roof needs replacing? What if one kid uses it constantly and another lives 2,000 miles away? What if somebody’s thirty-four-year-old son moves in “for a few months” and is still there two years later?

Soon we’ve accomplished something remarkable. We’ve taken Mom and Dad’s happiest memories and converted them into a homeowners association run by ghosts.

That’s not the legacy anyone had in mind.

You Can’t Leave Them the Summer

Here’s the hard part: You can leave your children a beach house. You can’t leave them the summer.

You can’t require them to love the same place you loved, live near one another, vacation together, marry people who get along, have children on a convenient schedule, or continue family traditions simply because the trust says they should. Nor should you. Your children get their own lives. The world they inherit won’t be the world you knew.

Clarksdale changed. The bank became a place for parties. A forgotten house on a hillside outside Kyoto emptied out while one of its carefully wrapped bowls found its way into Robert’s hands. Things outlive their reasons. Sometimes that’s not a tragedy. Sometimes it’s the whole point.

That’s why good estate planning has to start one level deeper. Not: “How do I keep this house in the family forever?”

But: “What am I actually trying to accomplish?”

Sometimes a client comes in determined to save the beach house and after enough conversation realizes she doesn’t really care about the beach house. She cares about Christmas. Or cousins knowing one another. Or making sure the kid who hits a rough patch always has somewhere to go.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

If what you really want is for your family to have the means to gather, maybe the house does that. Maybe it produces enough income to support itself and everybody genuinely loves using it. Keep the house. Wonderful.

But maybe the better gift is giving your children the wherewithal to create their own gatherings. Rent a house at the beach. Go to the mountains. Meet in Italy. Pile everybody into an RV and discover exactly how much family togetherness is too much. Let them decide.

Because the inheritance isn’t supposed to be the building. It’s supposed to be the freedom.

That requires a different conversation with clients. Of course I need to know what you own, who gets it, and who serves as trustee. Those are the nuts and bolts. But before we get very far with any of them, I want to know something else: “What are you actually trying to accomplish?”

Once we understand that, the legal machinery becomes easier. We can build a plan around the purpose rather than the monument. We can preserve what matters while leaving room for the people who come after us to live lives we cannot possibly predict.

And someday, decades from now, perhaps somebody will find one of our possessions carefully wrapped in a box. They’ll hold it up and wonder who owned it, why it mattered, and what happened to the people who once lived there.

The ghosts won’t answer. They never do.

But if we’ve planned well, our children won’t need the bowl—or the bank, or the beach house—to live the life we hoped our estate would make possible. They’ll have the freedom and the means to make their own summer. Once we know the meaning, the documents come easy.

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I am Scott Schomer — a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors and Schomer Law Group, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. If this resonated, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

When you’re ready to make sure what you leave behind is a gift, not a burden, visit www.schomerlawgroup.com or call (310) 337-7696.

#TrustProf #EstatePlanning #Legacy #Meaning #FamilyWealth

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Dogs do that. They do not merely move into our homes: they rearrange them. They create rituals — morning walks, evening walks, emergency walks brought on by a reckless decision involving cheese. They create new conversations and new reasons to come home. Otherwise rational adults start discussing bowel movements with the gravity of Federal Reserve governors studying inflation data. A dog brings noise, inconvenience, laughter, and life.

Which raises a perfectly natural question: can we leave Maisie everything?

The Probate Code Has Reviewed the Matter

Emotionally, Maisie is a member of the family. Legally, the situation is less flattering. She is not a person. She cannot inherit property outright, open a bank account, sign a receipt, or hire an investment adviser. She cannot diversify her portfolio, question the trustee’s strategy, or object when somebody swaps the premium chicken treats for a generic biscuit from Costco. She cannot even be trusted alone with an unattended sandwich.

You may think of your dog as your child. The Probate Code has reviewed the matter and respectfully disagrees. To the law, Maisie is an animal and, historically, property.

Please do not tell her.

This creates a genuine estate-planning problem: we love these creatures like family, but the law won’t let us simply write “I leave $100,000 to Maisie” and expect the probate judge to cut her a check and a complimentary debit card. For centuries the law struggled with this, because a traditional trust needs a beneficiary who can enforce it. If the trustee steals the money, somebody has to be able to walk into court and complain. Dogs are poorly equipped for that assignment: they lack standing, legal capacity, and reliable transportation to the courthouse.

Trixie Goes to Court

In 1948, an Ohio man named George Searight died and left behind a dog named Trixie. His will gave Trixie to a woman named Florence Hand and directed his executor to deposit $1,000 in the bank, from which Florence would draw 75 cents a day for Trixie’s care, for as long as the dog lived. Seventy-five cents a day was apparently enough to keep a dog in style in 1948. Today it might buy one artisanal duck-flavored treat, assuming the dog doesn’t require validated parking.

The arrangement landed in court.

The first problem was that Trixie herself could not enforce the trust. Lawyers called arrangements like this “honorary trusts.” The trustee was expected to carry out the dead man’s wishes, but no recognized beneficiary existed who could march into court and demand an accounting. The arrangement depended largely on the trustee’s willingness to perform. This assumes, of course, that the trustee had a conscience. Estate planning has never managed to eliminate that particular risk.

The second problem was the Rule Against Perpetuities, a centuries-old doctrine meant to keep property from being tied up forever. The court fretted openly about trusts for unusually long-lived animals, singling out crocodiles, elephants, and sea turtles by name. Trixie was a mongrel fox terrier, not a Galápagos tortoise, but the court ran the numbers anyway. At 75 cents a day, the $1,000 would run dry in three years and 238⅓ days. Even at the then-extravagant interest rate of 6 percent, the money would stretch to four years and 57½ days, no further. Somewhere in Ohio, a judge and several lawyers billed actual hours calculating the investment life of a fox terrier’s lunch money.

The trust survived.

Then the Ohio Department of Taxation showed up, arguing that the fund owed inheritance tax and that Trixie herself had a taxable value. The probate court settled on five dollars. The executor was less generous: “The dog may have a value of two, three or five dollars. It has no value other than that of a mongrel fox-terrier dog. Frankly I would say it could be argued that the fair market value of the dog was zero.”

There it is. To the executor, Trixie may have been worth nothing. To George Searight, she was worth planning for. That may be the entire story of dogs and the law, in two sentences.

The appellate court upheld the arrangement, ruling that caring for Trixie was neither capricious nor illegal, and that the money spent on her wasn’t subject to Ohio’s succession tax, since that statute reached only property passing for the use of a “person, institution or corporation.” Trixie was none of the above. She was merely loved.

The story doesn’t end with the tidy exhaustion of the $1,000 fund, though. A car struck Trixie on October 30, 1949, and Florence collected only $255.75 for her care. The arithmetic had been perfect. Life was not.

Then Came Trouble

Trixie wasn’t the last dog to land a trust fund. Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel magnate known as the “Queen of Mean,” left $12 million in trust for her white Maltese, Trouble. Twelve million dollars is a substantial allowance for a dog with no mortgage, no college tuition, and remarkably little exposure to federal income tax. Trouble could not manage the money herself, of course. She was a Maltese. She had people for that.

“The dog is the only thing that loved her and he deserves every single penny of it". —Donald J. Trump

A court-approved settlement eventually cut the trust from $12 million to $2 million, condemning Trouble to a bleak life of premium food, veterinary care, grooming, and security.

Yes, security. The publicity around the inheritance reportedly brought real threats against Trouble, who needed protection because the world now knew she was rich, white, four-legged, and almost certainly unable to pick her kidnappers out of a lineup. Helmsley also wanted Trouble buried beside her in the family mausoleum, but the cemetery didn’t allow animal remains. Even $12 million can’t always beat cemetery regulations.

The most telling part of the story might be this: the people originally named to take Trouble reportedly didn’t want her. Trouble had $12 million and still had trouble finding someone willing to take custody.

Money buys excellent grooming. It doesn’t buy affection.

The Law Learns a New Trick

Modern law eventually caught up to what dog owners always knew: people are going to provide for their animals whether the legal system finds it dignified or not. California now expressly recognizes a trust created for the care of an animal. Probate Code section 15212 calls it “a trust for a lawful noncharitable purpose,” a phrase with all the warmth of a parking citation, but there’s a humane idea buried inside it. You don’t leave the money directly to the dog. You leave it to a trustee, bound by enforceable instructions that the money go toward the dog’s care.

The trustee manages the money. A caregiver handles the daily walks and vet visits. Someone else can be named to enforce the whole arrangement, and the statute even allows for inspection of the animal, the place she lives, and the trust records. Somewhere in Sacramento, a legislator pictured a trustee pocketing the money while the real beneficiary slept behind a refrigerator.

For once, the Legislature understood the assignment.

A thoughtful pet trust answers the practical questions that get urgent fast when nobody has answered them in advance:

• Who takes the dog home, and has that person actually agreed to it?

• Who controls the money, and how much goes toward food, vet care, medication, and grooming?

• Should bonded animals stay together, and can the dog remain in the family home, on the furniture or off it?

• What happens if expensive treatment becomes necessary, and who decides when it’s merciful versus when it just prolongs suffering?

• Who receives whatever is left after the last animal dies?

The money matters, but the caretaker matters more. Surprise custody works poorly with children and even worse with Rottweilers.

Moab Has Joined the Meeting

At our office, dogs aren’t an abstract legal category. Bradley Kleihege’s dog, Moab, has sat in on office affairs. Other dogs have attended staff meetings, and their contributions tend to be concise, strongly food-motivated, and at least as useful as some of the contributions made by the humans in the room.

We’ve prepared pet trusts for dogs and cats whose owners understand a simple truth: these animals may carry little or no fair-market value, and that has nothing to do with what they’re actually worth. A dog might be worth five dollars to the tax collector and nothing at all on a rescue’s intake form. Then she walks into a house, takes possession of the good chair, and becomes priceless.

What Maisie Is Worth

Maisie can’t inherit our money. She can’t open a brokerage account, choose a trustee, or monitor investment performance, and she certainly can’t petition the probate court if her caregiver falls short of the required standard of belly scratches. But we can make sure that if she outlives us, the right person, the right instructions, and enough money are waiting for her.

The Probate Code doesn’t love your dog. The Probate Code doesn’t love anyone. But buried in all that statutory language is a surprisingly tender idea: the animal who trusted you in life should not become an afterthought after your death.

Trixie was worth somewhere between zero and five dollars in an Ohio courtroom. To George Searight, she was worth a paragraph in his will. Maisie Daisy Diva Bobbi Brown is presently occupied with her magazine career, her household management portfolio, and the strategic redistribution of dog hair. Her fair-market value is probably negligible. Her value to us is another matter entirely, and on National Dog Day, that’s the only valuation that counts.

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I’m Scott Schomer, a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors and Schomer Law Group, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. I write here twice a month, usually about something a dog or a dead rock star taught me about the law.

Legal notes: In re Searight’s Estate, 87 Ohio App. 417, 95 N.E.2d 779 (Ohio Ct. App. 1950); California Probate Code § 15212

One of these colleagues, let’s call him Danny, is a lawyer I’ve known for fifteen years. I’ve learned as much from him as he’s taught me. He’s the kind of man who builds things—not just a practice, but a culture, a way of doing business that makes people want to stay. He was telling us about one of his attorneys, Judy, and how she came to work for him. And in telling that story, he told us something else entirely.

Danny wasn’t always a lawyer.

Years ago, early in his marriage, he tried his hand at business. He worked hard. By every measure, he did the things you’re supposed to do. And the business failed anyway. That’s the part nobody tells you about—sometimes you do everything right and it collapses.

The house had to go. The sale was brutal, so upside-down that when the papers closed, Danny and his wife owed the realtor ten thousand dollars. They had to pay it over time, like a debt they’d carry forward from a chapter they were trying to close.

With three young children, no house, almost no money, they moved into the attic of his mother-in-law’s home.

An attic. Five people. Basically nothing.

But Danny remembers those days differently than you might expect. He told us about Saturday nights. Pizza night. Not some gourmet thing. Just an order placed, a family gathered, kids laughing, the four of them—well, five—squeezed into that attic space and genuinely happy.

Pizza was a luxury then. It was a cause for celebration. And the thing that made it real, that made it matter, wasn’t the pizza. It was the people. It was the love that made a cramped attic feel like the center of the world.

When Danny tells this part of the story, his face changes. He’s not talking about hardship. He’s talking about the happiest days of his life.

What he learned living in that attic was simple, and it stayed with him. It’s only stuff. You can lose everything. A house, a business, a plan. But if you have your health, if you have the people who love you, if you have the people who will work with you—you have what matters.

Within a year, Danny went to law school. It wasn’t a backup plan. It was his way forward, but—and this is important—not a way away from the values he’d learned living in that attic. Those stayed.

He built a practice. He built it slowly, deliberately, the way you build something that lasts. And as he did, something remarkable happened. Those values didn’t fade. They didn’t get buried under billables or efficiency metrics. They stayed alive. They became the way he hired people, the way he treated people, the way he thought about what a law practice could be.

Then one day, a pastor from his church approached him. “I want to introduce you to someone,” the pastor said. “You’re going to hire her. And after you do, you’re going to thank me.”

That someone was Judy.

She was studying for the bar exam. A single mother with two children. She’d been working her way through school and toward a career when, without warning or severance or a second thought, her insurance company employer terminated her. Just cut her loose. No concern for her situation, no recognition of her work or her talent, no acknowledgment of the fact that she was trying to build something better for her family.

It was casual cruelty dressed up as business.

But the pastor saw something in Judy that her former employer had somehow missed—or worse, saw and didn’t care about. The same thing that would eventually make her Danny’s partner and the heir to his practice. But first, Danny had to see it too.

When she came in for an interview, there were other candidates. Danny likes people. He liked all of them. But his executive assistant, Donna, looked at all three, then sat down across from Danny with the kind of expression that doesn’t ask permission. The kind that says: Don’t be an idiot about this. Hire her.

Donna didn’t have patience for his niceness. She could see what Danny was too generous to trust his own judgment about. She saw the talent that an insurance company had thrown away. She saw a diamond, and she made sure Danny knew it.

Judy came on board and worked. She learned. She showed up. She did the work that validated every bit of faith the pastor, Donna, and Danny had placed in her.

And then she came to Danny with news that terrified her: another baby on the way.

She was braced for rejection. She’d already lived through what happens when an employer decides you’re disposable. She expected Danny to do the math, to see the risk, to protect his business from the burden of a woman with children.

Instead, Danny lit up. “Congratulations. There’s nothing but joy here. I’m happy for you.”

In that moment, he did what living in the attic had taught him. He chose people.

She passed the bar. She returned as a working mother with three children. She learned the practice area. She earned Danny’s trust not in a moment, but through years of work, through showing up, through becoming invaluable to him and to the business.

Today, Judy is his partner. His equal. When Danny steps away—if he ever can—she will carry on what he built. The practice will survive. But more than that, the values will survive.

Every time Judy walks into that office, every deal she closes, every client she serves, every moment she thrives—she’s living proof that the people discarded by the world sometimes contain the greatest value. That what one employer saw as disposable, another recognizes as precious.

I watched Danny tell this story from across the table. And I watched him talk about his grandchildren, and how he features them in client seminars, and how he brings his whole self—not some sterile attorney version—to everything he does. This is a man who learned in an attic that what you have is people. And he built an empire on that truth.

Sitting at that bar, watching Danny tell this story, I realized something: this is what gratitude looks like in action.

Most people come to me thinking estate planning is about stuff. How to protect it, how to move it, how to make sure it ends up in the right hands.

But planning isn’t really about stuff. It’s an act of gratitude. It’s when you stop, turn around, and look backward at everything you’ve built, everyone who helped you get there. Then you make a choice about what actually matters.

That’s what Danny did when he lit up at Judy’s news. That’s what Donna did when she refused to let him miss what was actually valuable. That’s what the pastor did when he saw what was possible.

And it’s what you get to do when you sit down to plan.

Not to calculate numbers—though we will. But to ask yourself: What do I want to leave behind? Who do I love? What did I learn that matters enough to pass forward? What values are worth more than any house or investment?

Danny’s practice survives because he never forgot the attic. Never forgot that people matter more than stuff. That the person you hire today—even if they’ve been discarded by someone else—might be your partner tomorrow. That real wealth isn’t built in big moments—it’s built in Saturday nights with pizza and people who matter.

That’s the work. That’s what makes planning meaningful.

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I’m Scott Schomer, a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors and Schomer Law Group, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. I write here twice a month about the stories, choices, and values that shape how we plan.

If this resonated, subscribe for free and share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’re ready to start building a plan that actually reflects what matters to you, visit www.schomerlawgroup.com or call us at (310) 337-7696.

You cannot sign a thick stack of papers, shake hands with your attorney, place the binder reverently on the shelf next to the tax returns and your college diploma, and consider the matter resolved. The assets actually have to make the trip. This is the part that separates estate planning from estate wishing.

I know this because a friend of mine — a lawyer, no less — almost learned it the hard way. And her story is instructive in the particular way that other people’s near-disasters always are.

She had just finalized her divorce. Sharp attorney. The kind who could dismantle an opposing witness with a raised eyebrow and two well-timed questions. Years in the courtroom. Encyclopedic knowledge of procedure. The sort of person you would trust to handle the details.

During the marriage, she and her husband had created a joint trust together. During the divorce, she created a brand new trust — new terms, new beneficiaries, new instructions, clean slate. The legal equivalent of burning the wedding album and repainting every room in the house.

Then she called me with a question.

“Do I really need to move the assets into the new trust?”

I paused.

The assets were still sitting in the old trust. The joint trust. The one drafted back when they still liked each other enough to share appetizers, vacation photos, and apparently, all of their worldly possessions.

In other words: the man she had just divorced was, at that precise moment, the presumptive beneficiary of everything she had spent thirty years building.

I told her yes. Yes, she needed to move the assets. With some urgency. Don’t give your ex-husband your assets.

Here is the legal reality, because it matters and because California makes it genuinely complicated.

Under Probate Code section 15200, a trust gets created in several recognized ways — transferring property to a trustee, declaring yourself trustee of your own property, or a handful of other methods. The critical point is that creation and funding are two entirely different events. You can have a perfectly drafted trust that controls absolutely nothing, because nothing was ever put into it.

And then there is Estate of Heggstad (1993), which California estate planning attorneys discuss the way musicians talk about a legendary bootleg recording — with reverence, some disagreement about interpretation, and occasional misapplication by people who should know better.

Heggstad established that under certain circumstances, a written declaration in a trust schedule identifying specific property as trust assets could itself confirm trust ownership — even without a separate deed transferring title. It has saved many California families from unnecessary probate. It has also generated a considerable number of arguments among lawyers about exactly how far the doctrine extends, and whether it applies to their particular situation, which is a separate and ongoing entertainment.

But here is what Heggstad is not: a reason to leave your assets sitting in the wrong trust.

It is a life raft. Not a cruise ship. You don’t plan your vacation around the life raft.

My friend’s situation had a specific and darkly comic quality to it. She had done everything right on paper. New trust. New documents. New chapter. What she had not yet done was move a single asset into that new chapter. The old trust — complete with its old distribution plan, old beneficiary designations, and old roadmap to a future that no longer existed — was still fully loaded and pointed directly at her ex-husband.

Hunter Thompson once wrote that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. In estate planning, when the going gets complicated, the paperwork turns adversarial. It stops working for you and starts working for whoever you forgot to remove.

That is not a metaphor. That is a probate proceeding.

This is what families actually fight about in courtrooms after someone dies. Not abstract philosophy. Not “what mom would have wanted.” They fight about titles. Beneficiary designations. Trust schedules nobody reviewed in fifteen years. An asset that got left in the wrong place by someone who got busy and meant to get around to it.

If this confuses attorneys — and it does, regularly — imagine what it does to families already navigating grief, blended marriages, adult children with opinions, and two decades of accumulated emotional luggage they’ve been hauling around since the first divorce.

The trust controls where the assets go. That is the whole game.

The documents define the destination. The funding puts the car on the road. If the car is still sitting in the wrong driveway, pointed at the wrong house, it does not matter how beautiful the map is.

She moved the assets. Her ex-husband went on to benefit from her careful planning in exactly zero ways, which is how she intended it and which is, frankly, a more satisfying ending than most estate planning stories get.

The binder is not the plan. The funding is the plan.

And if you are not certain your assets are in the right trust — call someone before your ex-husband gets an unexpected and entirely undeserved inheritance. He has been surprised enough already.

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I am Scott Schomer — Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Law Group and Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. If this was useful, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it — especially anyone going through a divorce and feeling dangerously confident about their paperwork.

Ready to make sure your plan actually works? Visit schomerlawgroup.com or call (310) 337-7696.

I’m always glad to hear from them. But I’ll be honest — that urgency concerns me.

Estate Planning Is Not Something You Rush

Done properly, estate planning requires a careful, deliberate examination of how you hold your wealth — your assets, your accounts, your real property, your business interests — and a thoughtful strategy for managing it, transferring it, and minimizing the tax burden on the people you leave behind. That process takes time. It requires conversation. It requires reflection. Rushing through it in the name of a departure date does a disservice to everything you’ve spent a lifetime building.

The Story I Can’t Stop Thinking About

I know of a case — handled by a highly qualified, experienced estate planning attorney — where a client did everything right. He engaged a skilled professional. They met several times. They worked carefully together to craft a thorough, well-considered plan. The documents were prepared, reviewed, and ready to sign.

He died two hours before the signing appointment.

His partner — the person he intended to provide for — was left with almost nothing. Because they were unmarried, the law did not automatically protect their relationship the way it would a spouse. Without a signed estate plan, there was no legal mechanism to transfer the assets they had built together over many years.

An unsigned estate plan is worth nothing. No court will enforce it. No financial institution will honor it.

What Saved Him — Barely

What ultimately rescued the partner was a handwritten note — a holographic will — discovered folded at the bottom of a desk drawer. It was old. It was not comprehensive. But it was signed, and under the law, it was something. The matter still had to proceed through probate court. It took significantly longer and cost significantly more than it ever should have.

All of that — every bit of it — could have been avoided with one signed appointment.

If you have been meaning to get your estate plan in place — please don’t wait for the trip, the diagnosis, or the scare to make the call. The best estate plan is the one that is finished, signed, and in place long before you think you need it. The second best time to start is today.

This happened last month. It matters because it's not new.

In South Korea, 35 percent of all stock trading volume is leveraged margin trading. The KOSPI hit an all-time high in June. Then it fell 44 percent in two weeks. Over the same period, 1.2 million retail investors received margin calls. Over 320,000 accounts were forcibly liquidated by their brokers. A 2-times leveraged ETF on SK Hynix fell 66 percent when the underlying stock fell 40 percent. Most of the liquidated accounts belonged to people under 30 years old.

A 24-year-old turned his military savings of 20 million won (approximately 18,000 dollars) into 300 million won using five-times leverage. Then he watched it disappear in a month. He said he couldn't breathe.

Ninety years ago, before the Great Depression, margin lending was rampant. People borrowed to buy stocks. When the market turned, they lost everything. It became one of the foundational causes of the crash. People borrowed because they didn't understand what they were buying, or what could go wrong.

Jim Chanos, a Lecturer in Finance at Yale School of Management and founder of Kynikos Associates, talks about today as the golden age of fraud. Part of what he means is this. People are investing in things they don't understand. They're using leverage to amplify returns they don't understand. And when leverage amplifies losses, it destroys everything.

This matters to trustees. And it matters when you're your own trustee.

I regularly encounter people whose stated investment philosophy doesn't align with what they actually own. A 77-year-old woman tells me her approach is conservative. Then I look at her portfolio. Eighty-five percent in a small basket of stocks. No diversification. No bonds. Nothing conservative about it. Most likely, these investments were never fully explained to her. Or worse, she was misled about what she actually owned. Her portfolio doesn't match what she believes about herself.

Fiduciary standards exist for a reason. Close to a century of legal precedent and academic research say the same thing: understand what you own, be cautious about leverage, manage risk properly. These standards work because they're built on hard-won lessons from the Depression, the tech crash, 2008, and countless other disasters.

If an outsider—a trustee hired to protect your interests—would be legally required to follow these standards, why wouldn't you follow them when you're protecting your own interests? If a century of law and academic research has concluded that leverage destroys and diversification protects, why would you act otherwise with your own money?

The people who lost money in South Korea most likely didn't mean to gamble. Most likely, they didn't understand the risks of leverage or what they were actually buying. The retired couple who put their savings into an AI infrastructure fund most likely didn't realize that fund was using four-times leverage. Most likely, they found out only when the margin calls came and half their money was gone.

If you're a trustee, you need to understand what you own, why you own it, and what can happen when things go wrong.

And if you're your own trustee, the standard shouldn't be lower just because nobody is looking over your shoulder.

Diversification isn't exciting. Prudence doesn't make for a very good screenshot. And nobody has ever gone viral bragging about a properly balanced portfolio.

That's sort of the point.

The best investing isn't designed to make you rich by Tuesday. It's designed to make sure you're still wealthy on Wednesday.

That's what fiduciaries have learned over nearly a century of market booms, crashes, bubbles, frauds, and very expensive lessons. Protect first. Diversify. Understand what you own. Be extraordinarily careful with borrowed money.

If you'd like to talk about how those principles fit into an academic approach to investing, come by. We'll keep the coffee warm.

History has been remarkably consistent about one thing:

Leverage works until it doesn't.

And when it doesn't, you don't get to choose what gets sold.

#TrustProf #EstatePlanning #FiduciaryInvesting #InvestmentPhilosophy #AcademicInvesting #WealthProtection #MarketHistory

As a young man, itching for adventure and looking for cars, Route 119 became something else entirely. It was the Highway of barn finds; cars in need of some elbow grease. It became a highway of possibility.

The Salt Roads of the South

Where I grew up, in southern Michigan, the road crews salted the highways every winter. The salt did its job perfectly. It melted the ice and destroyed the cars. Anything over five years old began to rust from the inside out. We called it "cancer." My favorite car, the Ford Mustang, earned a darker nickname: the Rustang. The irony was perfect: the salt was solving one problem beautifully while creating another. Which is how most shortcuts work.

But up in Emmett County, they didn't salt the roads in winter. Which meant a young man looking for undervalued cars—diamonds in the rough—could actually find machines worth saving. Cars with bodies that hadn't yet turned to rust and regret.</p>

Ford and the Rust

My father worked for Ford Motor Company in manufacturing. He supervised the construction of suspension components. The work most people never think about.

Here's the thing: Ford had it figured out. They invented rust prevention technology. Electrolysis dip systems. Electrically charged paint baths that could protect car bodies from the very corrosion that was eating vehicles alive on Michigan roads. Ford was smart enough to lease the technology to competitors and make money off it.

Just not committed enough to use it on their own cars.

The Mustang, one of the most iconic cars in America, earned its reputation as a Rustang because short-term decisions won. Sell the car today. Worry about rust tomorrow. Or next year. Or never, because by then the customer was someone else's problem.

And once you make that choice, you can't undo it. The legacy doesn't recover. The car rots in the driveway, and everyone remembers the rot, not the ingenuity that could have prevented it.

The Choice

So there I was, fifteen years old, looking down Route 119 for adventure. And I was watching what happens when you choose the short road instead of the long one. When you solve today's problem without thinking about tomorrow's bill.

The cars on the side of the road represented a different path. They were old. Old Triumph Spitfires and TR fours. Mustangs. Mercury Cougars. Ford Broncos. All undervalued. All dismissed. All waiting for someone young and stubborn enough to believe that rescue was possible.

These weren't fantasy cars. They were freedom. A machine that worked was a door that opened. It meant you could drive somewhere. It meant you could see what was beyond the next county line. It meant you had built something with your own hands that you could point to and say, "I did that. I rescued this. I made it mine."

What the Machines Taught

I never got into those cars because I wanted to own something pretty. A fifteen-year-old with grease under his fingernails doesn't care much about pretty. I got into them because they were mine. Because taking one apart meant I could put it back together. Because understanding how it worked meant I could fix it. And because a working car meant freedom.

There's a difference between a machine that's been cynically engineered to sell and one that's been loved back to life by someone who actually gives a damn. The first is a transaction. The second is rescue. You become the owner not just by purchase but by sweat and study and stubborn refusal to let something good stay broken.

And yes, there's a difference between a mechanic who charges you for the part that makes him money and a craftsman who takes time to know your machine, to understand what it actually needs, to solve the problem rather than sell you the solution. The mechanic keeps you coming back. The craftsman sets you free.

The world has far too many mechanics. Not nearly enough people willing to be the craftsman for someone else, or for themselves.

Eventually, I acquired a car from the side of the road—muscle car no less—before I even had my driver’s license. I threw myself at the project with all the wisdom of a teenage boy, which is to say none. I had successes and plenty of failures. Some decisions were sound. Others I wince at now, understanding only in hindsight what I should have known. But the labor itself, the act of taking apart something broken and making it whole and mine—that was the education. That was the only point that ever mattered.

Fifty Years Later

The industry learned. Modern cars don't rust the way they used to. The salt roads of southern Michigan don't devour vehicles the way they did in my youth. The problem improved because enough people in enough places refused to let short-term thinking have the final word.

But there are still cars on the side of the road. Still projects. Still possibility.

And I built a practice on a principle that watching organizations taught me: you can only truly steward what you have agency over.That knowing the right answer means nothing if your structure is built to prioritize something else. So I built an integrated practice, where estate planning and trust administration and investment advisory all live together, aligned, under one roof. Not to maximize profit today. To build lasting legacy.

That was the real inheritance. Not the Rustang. Not the sting of watching brilliant solutions get buried in organizational priorities. But the understanding that stewardship demands commitment to the long arc, not the short quarter. It requires choosing the decision that holds up fifty years from now, not just today.

The Question

What are the broken things sitting on the side of the road in your life? The family property that needs attention. The inherited portfolio that's being managed but not stewarded. The trust you administer but treat as an obligation rather than a project worthy of your craftsmanship and judgment.

Do you have the agency to improve it? Or are you working inside a trust agreement, a family structure, a corporate hierarchy, where you can see exactly what's broken but lack the power to fix it?

Real stewardship isn't passive management. It's the willingness to get your hands dirty, to understand deeply, and to make something genuinely better than you found it.

Fifty years after that first summer in Harbor Cove, I'm still doing the same work. I still work on cars. My Miata. My Porsche. I still spend time understanding how they work, what needs attention, what I can improve. If you drove by my garage on a Saturday, you'd see a middle-aged man with grease on his hands and not much to show for it yet—at least by the measure of people who think "to show for it" means having someone else do the work and having them call it done.

But I know better now. The work isn't the problem. The problem is thinking that having something is the same as understanding it. That owning something is the same as caring for it. That you can inherit a machine or a trust or a business or a life and leave it unmade, and that counts as stewardship.

The point is still what it was when I was fifteen, looking down Route 119 for possibility.

The point is the work. The care. The refusal to treat the machine, the client, the trust, the life as just another transaction. The willingness to understand deeply and to make something genuinely better than you found it.

That's what I'm still looking for when I drive down that highway.

The menu stays in period. The Continental Reuben, named for the army. The Mount Vernon, named for the farm.

I should tell you that I am a burger man. I have gone back to the Hunter House in Birmingham more times than I can count, and those sliders taught me most of what I know on the subject. Under ordinary circumstances I consider a ham and cheese sandwich a failure of ambition.

I ordered the Mount Vernon. Baked Virginia ham, double Swiss, their sauce, on an onion roll.

I had not eaten one in more than thirty years, and on occasion, when the time is right, the thing shows up in my dreams.

Here is what I missed until later, turning it over on the drive north.

Every other name on that menu points at the war. Mount Vernon points at the house.

Washington won. He had the army, the standing, and the moment, and he could have kept all of it. He handed back his commission instead and went home to a farm on the Potomac, because what he wanted was the porch and the fields and the river running past them. Eight years of fighting in service of getting back to something ordinary.

Odysseus ran the same arithmetic. Ten years at Troy, then ten more spent trying to get home. Calypso offered him immortality and he turned it down for a rocky island, a wife who had grown older, and a son he barely knew. When he finally landed, ragged and disguised past recognition, the first one to know him was the old dog.

Homer understood something. A man will cross the known world to get back to the place where the dog knows him.

I was eighteen or nineteen the last time I sat in that booth, maybe a little past that. Our parents used to bring us. The conversation ran lively and nobody sent me to a separate table. It may have been the first time I drank a beer with my parents in public. I can date my earliest memory of being an adult to that room. Not a kid, not the strange alien teenager, but a person with a seat and an opinion. Welcome to the world.

Then thirty years happened. California happened. A practice, a classroom, a courtroom, a family of my own.

Around the table this time: my wife Colleen, my brother Eric, his wife Diane, and their son Nathan.

My father has been gone since 2009.

My mother was already up north, waiting for us at Harbor Springs, which may be the house all of us love best.

My daughters could not make the trip. They have their own commitments now, which is what you want for them and also the thing nobody warns you about.

So, we sat in a dark tavern in Royal Oak, five of us where there might have been nine, and I ate a pedestrian sandwich that undid me a little.

The sandwich was never the point. It was a way back in. Thirty years of turns and detours and decisions, and that onion roll held the whole map of it.

I have spent something like thirty years now sitting with families at the other end of this. People come to my office to talk about documents and taxes and who gets the cabin. What they are actually doing, most of the time, is taking stock. They are looking back down the road at the turns and the milestones and trying to work out what mattered and what they want carried forward.

Nobody schedules that. It arrives on its own, usually late, sometimes too late to do much about.

So, I would offer this. Go back to the place. If the place is gone, go back to the memory, which travels better anyway. Sit in the booth. Order the thing you have been thinking about for thirty years. Then look at the road behind you and take an honest accounting of it.

That accounting is the real work. Preserve what is precious. Improve on what is already good. Celebrate the journey. The legal documents come after, and they are the easy part. They only put a frame around a decision you have already made.

We leave for Harbor Springs today. My mother is up there with the coffee on, and Little Traverse Bay will be doing what it always does, which is holding the light on the water in a way I have never found anywhere else, California included.

The water will be cold. It always is. We will go in anyway.

Go back and see where you came from. Then decide what you want to leave standing there for the people who come looking after you.


@TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I am Scott Schomer, a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors and Schomer Law Group, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. I write here twice a month. If this resonated, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

When you’re ready to make sure your family gets a map instead of a minefield, visit www.schomerlawgroup.com or call (310) 337-7696.

My family had its share of what you might call free spirits. Aunts and uncles who went by names like Jude, Ell-Bell, and Fish — names that were not the names on their birth certificates, which was rather the point. Some of them were in Haight-Ashbury. One made it to Woodstock. Another was in Chicago in 1968, standing in Grant Park when the whole thing went sideways, which was also rather the point. They believed in something. They believed in a great many somethings, actually, many of which are difficult to reconstruct with precision from this distance.

But the throughline, if you paid attention, was this: institutions were corrupt, paperwork was a trap, and love didn’t need permission from anyone.

Joni Mitchell understood that feeling as well as anyone who ever put it to music. In 1971 she released My Old Man, a song about living with someone, loving someone completely, needing no ceremony to ratify what was already true.

We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, she sang, keeping us tied and true.

It was beautiful.

It was also, from a California estate planning perspective, a slow-moving financial disaster. But we’ll get there.

Here is something most people don’t know: early California once recognized marriages formed without licenses or formal ceremonies. What we would now loosely call common law marriage.

Not in 1971. Nearly a century earlier.

During the Gold Rush, California was young, sprawling, and chaotic. Men were disappearing into the Sierra Nevada chasing fortunes. Judges were scarce. Roads were unreliable. Formal institutions had not yet fully caught up with the speed of the frontier. If two people lived together, held themselves out as husband and wife, and intended to build a life together, courts were often willing to recognize the relationship.

It made sense for its time.

When you’re crossing the Sierra Nevada in a wagon with everything you own, legal formalities can begin to feel less urgent. You cannot wait three months for paperwork from Sacramento when winter is coming and the woman you love is standing right in front of you. The Donner Party famously believed they had plenty of time before the snow arrived. California has always had a way of punishing optimism about preparation, and the consequences of poor planning in the mountains have historically been grim — though at least with common law marriage, the worst case scenario was usually a contested estate rather than dinner with your traveling companions.

But California, being California, eventually got complicated.

By the 1880s the state was urbanizing rapidly, filling with immigrants from every corner of the globe, each carrying different assumptions about marriage and family. Courts began drowning in disputes. Who was actually married to whom? What constituted “holding yourself out”? How long was long enough? The informality that had been a practical frontier solution became, in the courts, a mess.

Property disputes multiplied. Estates became battlegrounds. And — this part would sound familiar to anyone who has spent time around a probate courtroom — wealthy men increasingly claimed they had never intended to be married at all.

The legislature’s concern, stated less delicately than we might today, was gold-diggers.

Which is a remarkable irony, because in practice, informal marriage doctrines were often one of the few protections vulnerable women actually had. Without legal recognition, a woman who had spent decades building a household alongside a man, helping raise children, contributing to his success, and being introduced everywhere as his wife could suddenly discover she had no automatic claim to anything at all. If he died, walked away, or simply denied the relationship, she was left with whatever protection happened to exist on paper.

Which, in many cases, was none.

The reformers and feminists of the era were divided on the issue. Some argued formal marriage created enforceable obligations that protected women and children. They weren’t wrong. Others worried that vulnerable families would be left exposed if the law ignored long-term relationships that everyone in the community recognized as marriages. They weren’t wrong either.

In 1895, California abolished the creation of new common law marriages. The courts described the doctrine as “fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings.” The legislature agreed. And on January 1, 1896, California drew a line it has never moved.

The Summer of Love happened seventy-one years after that line was drawn.

Nobody in Haight-Ashbury seemed terribly concerned about it.

To be fair, they were occupied with larger matters. Vietnam. Civil rights. Police batons. The yawning gap between the America that existed and the America they believed was possible. Against all of that, a marriage license probably did seem like a very small hill to die on.

Fish and Ell-Bell and Jude were not wrong to distrust institutions. Institutions had earned a certain amount of distrust. The counterculture changed America in ways that genuinely mattered. I watched it from a child’s distance and still felt the electricity of it without fully understanding the voltage.

But here is what the counterculture often missed, or postponed, or perhaps simply chose not to think about too carefully:

The piece of paper from city hall is not really about the government’s opinion of your love life.

It is about what happens to everything you built together after one of you is gone.

Let me tell you what I’ve seen over decades practicing estate planning and probate law in California.

I have sat across from couples who have been together twenty, thirty, even forty years. They’ve raised children. They’ve purchased homes. They’ve built businesses, retirement accounts, and entire lives together. Some avoided marriage for philosophical reasons. Some had been through painful divorces. Some simply kept putting it off until the years slipped by and suddenly they were in their seventies.

And then something happens.

Someone gets sick. Someone dies unexpectedly. Or the relationship itself falls apart.

And the surviving partner discovers that California does not particularly care how many Christmas cards they signed together.

The law does not care that neighbors assumed they were married. It does not care that the children called them a stepparent. It does not care what the deceased “always intended to do someday.”

California community property law generally does not protect them. California intestate succession laws generally do not protect them. California still broadly protects transfers between spouses from property tax reassessment. Unmarried partners do not receive the same automatic protections.

For larger estates, federal law becomes even more unforgiving. The unlimited federal estate tax marital deduction — one of the most powerful wealth-transfer tools in the tax code — is available only to legally recognized spouses. Unmarried partners receive no such deduction.

And if the home was titled in only one person’s name, the surviving partner may discover they have no automatic right to remain there at all.

Now, to be fair, California does offer another option. Registered domestic partnerships provide many protections similar to marriage under California law. But many couples never register those relationships either, often for the same reasons they avoided marriage in the first place. The philosophy remains. The paperwork remains undone.

The fraud concerns that motivated California lawmakers in the 1890s never disappeared, by the way. People still misrepresent relationships. Families still fight over estates. The law’s solution was documentation. Registration. Records. A piece of paper from city hall.

The very thing Joni Mitchell didn’t need.

And this is where California real estate law turns the whole story from philosophical to financially brutal.

Proposition 13, passed in 1978, effectively locked California property tax assessments to purchase price with only limited annual increases. A couple buys a modest California home in 1970 for $40,000. Fifty years later, the property may be worth $2 million while the tax bill still reflects a far older valuation.

It is one of the great accidental wealth engines in modern American history.

Then came Proposition 19 in 2020, which significantly narrowed the ability to transfer favorable property tax treatment to the next generation. But California still generally protects transfers between spouses from reassessment.

Unmarried partners do not receive the same automatic protection.

The consequences can be staggering. A surviving unmarried partner may suddenly inherit not only grief, but a property tax bill recalculated at modern California market values. Sometimes the increase is thousands of dollars a month. Sometimes the home itself becomes unaffordable.

I have had more than one conversation across my conference table with people who spent decades believing marriage was unnecessary. People who still carried the spirit of those old Joni Mitchell lyrics somewhere deep in their bones. People who loved each other sincerely and completely.

And I have advised them to reconsider the paperwork.

Not because love requires it.

Because the law does.

Several of them eventually married.

None, to my knowledge, regretted it.

The Summer of Love is over.

The people who were there are in their seventies and eighties now, navigating the very institutions they once rejected: Medicare, Social Security, estate planning, probate courts, hospitals, tax law, the whole machinery of later life. Some of them are my clients. Some are people I love.

Jude and Fish and Ell-Bell believed in freedom, and they were not wrong to. But freedom without a plan is not freedom. It’s exposure.

The counterculture changed music. Fashion. Politics. Relationships. America itself, in many ways.

It did not change California probate law.

Today, only a small minority of American jurisdictions still allow couples to create new common law marriages. California has not been one of them for more than 130 years. In most of America, no amount of shared years, shared addresses, shared last names, or shared intention automatically creates a marriage in the eyes of the law.

You still have to register with The Man.

I know. I know.

But here is the thing about The Man, at least in this particular context:

The Man’s rules around inheritance, taxation, property transfers, and spousal protections were written in ways that can genuinely protect the people you love. Ignoring those rules does not make you free. It simply leaves your partner holding a very expensive bag.

Joni Mitchell, for what it’s worth, eventually married.

Twice.

Even she came around.

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I am Scott Schomer — Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors and Schomer Law Group, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. I write here twice a month. If this resonated, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

If you are ready to build a plan that actually protects the people you love, visit schomerlawgroup.com or call us at (310) 337-7696.

Most people knew Mike as an estate planning attorney with an outstanding reputation built over decades. What I didn’t fully appreciate until we started working together was how much of his legacy lived outside the law entirely.

In 1953, at just 21 years old, Mike became Scoutmaster of Troop 223 in Pacific Palisades. He held that role for more than 70 years. Over that time, he guided 1,000 Scouts to the rank of Eagle — every one of them under his personal watch. To put that in perspective: only 4-7% of all Scouts ever reach Eagle. Producing even one requires sustained investment — years of Thursday nights, camping trips, merit badges, hard conversations, and the kind of patient mentorship that never makes headlines. One thousand Eagles, across seven decades, is not volunteerism. It is a vocation.

Mike’s example sent me back to my own years in Scouting, growing up in Michigan. I joined after changing schools in the fourth grade, new kid looking for footing. Our troop met Thursday nights in the gym of the local elementary school. We earned merit badges, sold candy, learned to pitch a tent in the rain and start a fire when everything was wet.

Growing up in Michigan, what I remember most clearly are the canoe trips on the Au Sable River. Once you’re out on moving water with your gear and your paddling partner, the Scout motto stops being a slogan. Be Prepared becomes operational. You learn that forgetting something doesn’t just inconvenience you — it affects everyone in the boat. You learn that a moment of carelessness has consequences that travel downstream. You learn to think ahead, carry your weight, and stay present even when nothing dramatic is happening, because that’s usually when something will.

The full Scout Law asks a young man to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Recited fast enough, it sounds like a list. Lived over time, it turns out to be a surprisingly complete description of character.

Which is why, when I stand in front of my Loyola law students and try to explain what fiduciary duty really means beneath all the legal language, I keep coming back to it. The law can define the duties — prudence, loyalty, impartiality, transparency, accountability. It can describe the standard of care and the consequences of breach. What it cannot fully capture is the disposition underneath those duties. The genuine orientation toward someone else’s wellbeing. The instinct to ask not what can I get away with but what would serve this person best.

That is a matter of character. And character, as any good Scoutmaster will tell you, is built long before anyone hands you a legal document to sign.

Mike Lanning understood this in his bones. He spent more than seven decades building it into young men — one Thursday night at a time, one campfire at a time, one Eagle badge at a time. And when the moment came to step away from his practice, he cared enough about his clients to make sure they landed somewhere safe. That instinct — to protect the people depending on you even when you’re no longer the one holding the reins — is about as good a definition of fiduciary duty as I’ve ever encountered.

When I talk to my law students about fiduciary duty, I tell them a trustee is supposed to act like a Boy Scout. I came to that idea on my own, over years of practice and teaching. But Mike was the first person I ever met who had actually lived it — not as a metaphor, but as a life. Dedicated to the very end. In the courtroom and around the campfire both.

We think about his example often.

The thousand men he shaped are still out there somewhere — leading troops of their own, raising families, running businesses, serving on boards, showing up when it matters. That is a legacy the law cannot fully measure and a probate court will never see.

Rest well, Mike. You were prepared. In every sense that counts.

— Scott P. Schomer

#EstatePlanning #Legacy #Remembrance #EagleScout #Scouting #Fiduciary #TrustsAndEstates #CaliforniaLaw #Leadership #BeingPrepared

Not because he feared the paperwork. Not because he worried about taxes or lawyers or any of the technical machinery of estate planning. He’d been dreading something harder to name — the way you dread a conversation you know you’ve been putting off too long, the one that requires you to look honestly at what you’ve built and who depends on it and what happens if you’re no longer there to hold it together.

He told me all of this at the end of an appointment that had turned out to be nothing like he feared. The conversation had been human. He understood the path forward. He was leaving with some decisions to think through and a second meeting on the calendar, and somehow — he seemed almost surprised by this — he felt lighter than when he walked in.

I’ve heard some version of that before. But it never becomes ordinary. Because what he was really describing wasn’t a legal consultation. It was the moment the thing he’d been avoiding turned out to be the thing he needed most.

Most people approach estate planning the way they approach a doctor’s appointment three years overdue — sitting down, bracing themselves, waiting for someone in a suit to narrate, in careful clinical language, exactly what happens when they’re gone. They expect fluorescent lights and cold coffee and the faint institutional smell of consequence.

What they don’t expect is to feel understood.

After decades of doing this work — as an attorney, as a law professor, as someone who has sat with thousands of families at the most consequential crossroads of their lives — I’ve come to believe that the dread people carry into these meetings is almost never really about the meeting. It’s about the question underneath it. Have I done enough? Will the people I love be okay? Will what I’ve spent my life building hold together after I’m no longer there to hold it?

Those aren’t legal questions. They’re human ones. And they deserve human answers.

Good estate planning is not about death. It is about life. And few cultures understand that better than the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos.

The name sounds somber, and the imagery can unsettle outsiders — skulls painted in vivid color, altars draped in marigolds, photographs of the departed surrounded by their favorite foods and bottles of tequila. But spend five minutes at an ofrenda and you understand immediately that this is not mourning. It is memory. It is love that refuses to be conjugated in the past tense.

Families build these altars to invite their ancestors back, just for a night. Grandparents, parents, children gone too soon — they return to the table not as grief but as presence. The stories get told again. The jokes land again. Someone plays the song the old man always requested. Someone argues, with great tenderness, about whether his tamales were really as extraordinary as everyone claims.

The tradition reaches back thousands of years to indigenous Aztec ceremonies that understood death not as a wall but as a passage — part of a continuing cycle rather than a final stop. When Spanish Catholic traditions arrived and wove themselves into those ancient roots, something beautiful emerged. Not a holiday about dying. A holiday about remembering. About refusing to let the people you loved become past tense.

That distinction is everything.

The fear most people carry into my office is not really about dying. It’s about disappearing — about the work of a lifetime dissolving into confusion and conflict the moment they’re no longer there to hold it together. I’ve watched that happen in families who never saw it coming, and it is one of the most preventable tragedies I know.

But I’ve also seen the other thing. The family that planned well. The children who didn’t have to fight because their parents had already answered the hard questions. The widow who didn’t have to navigate probate court while she was still learning to sleep in an empty house. The grandchildren who inherited not just assets but a clear sense of what those assets meant and what they were for.

At its best, estate planning is the deliberate act of saying: this mattered. These people mattered. This wisdom — the hard-won, expensive, occasionally hilarious kind that only comes from actually living — mattered. A trust is not merely a legal document. Sometimes it is a love letter wearing a suit. Sometimes it is a roadmap your children will unfold twenty years from now, grateful in ways they won’t quite be able to articulate. Sometimes it is the last clear chance to say: here is what we stood for, here is how we treat people, here is what we learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Every family has stories worth preserving — the grandfather who arrived with forty dollars and a stubbornness that turned out to be the most valuable thing he ever passed down, the grandmother whose grace held everything together in ways her children only fully understood after she was gone, the parents who gave up the life they’d imagined so their children could have the one they’d dreamed of. Those stories live in people. When people are gone, they need somewhere to go.

My client left our first meeting with a short list of things to think through — nothing frightening, nothing that couldn’t wait a week. But he also left with something he hadn’t expected to find in a lawyer’s office: the quiet recognition that the dread he’d been carrying was really just love. The love of someone who cares deeply about what happens to the people he’ll leave behind, who finally sat down and decided to do something about it.

The door he’d been avoiding turned out to open onto something that looked a great deal like peace.

Years from now, I hope someone in your family pulls out an old photograph and tells the story your kids have heard a hundred times but never tire of. I hope someone says, with complete and easy certainty: that is so exactly something she would have done. That is legacy — not a plaque, not a headstone, but a story still being told by people who loved you.

We’re here to make sure it keeps getting told.

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I’m Scott Schomer — Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Law Group and Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. I write here twice a month. If this resonated, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

When you’re ready to build a plan that actually protects your family — visit schomerlawgroup.com or call (310) 337-7696.

This is one of those cases.

Three siblings. Two of them lawyers. Their parents were gone, and their mother had named the daughter as trustee. She was organized, careful, and genuinely trying to do right by her parents’ wishes. She had bills to pay, paperwork to process, and a job that the law gives trustees a reasonable amount of time to complete.

The oldest brother — a partner at a major national firm, a bare-knuckle trial lawyer who his own sister described, with a kind of weary affection, as someone who enjoyed pulling the wings off butterflies — did not consider this reasonable. He wanted the money distributed immediately. Within weeks of his parents’ death.

She explained why that wasn’t possible.

He explained that she was incompetent.

It went downhill from there.

He filed to remove her as trustee. He accused her of fraud. He claimed that alleged medical issues compromised her ability to serve. He made clear there would be no compromise — not because the facts supported his position, but because he intended to prove a point. The fight centered mostly on a financial account that the trust documents themselves said should not be in the trust. The written instructions were explicit. That didn’t seem to matter. In his view, he and his sibling were entitled to those funds, and no piece of paper was going to tell him otherwise.

She pushed back. She said: I’ve done nothing wrong. Your demand for full distribution within a month of your parents’ death is not reasonable under any law I know of.

She was right.

The matter went to trial. Two days.

At trial, the brother announced — with what I can only describe as a certain pride — that he had spent the equivalent of one million dollars in legal fees pursuing approximately $150,000 in assets. But that wasn’t the half of it.

He also argued that the trustee’s decision to hold the funds during the dispute had cost him enormously — that he’d lost more than twelve percent on his investments while she sat on the money. He made this argument with complete conviction, seemingly unaware of what was about to happen next.

Our client had the receipts.

During that exact period, she had returned fourteen percent on his assets. Not lost twelve. Gained fourteen. She had actually outperformed what he claimed he would have done with the money, during the very window he was accusing her of mismanagement.

He didn’t adjust his argument. He didn’t pause. He pushed forward anyway.

Because the truth, at this point, had stopped being relevant to him.

Then came the fees. He had represented himself — or rather, he had calculated the value of his own time at his full retail billing rate and concluded that the trust owed him one million dollars. Not for outside counsel. For himself. Because in his mind, his time was worth exactly what he charged clients, and someone was going to pay for all of it.

That someone, he believed, should be his sister.

Sit with that for a moment.

A senior partner at a national law firm — a man who built a career on precision, on knowing the law, on reading a room — stood up in open court and billed his own mother’s estate for the privilege of losing. He itemized his grief. He put it on a timesheet. He calculated the hours he spent pursuing a fight he started, over instructions his mother wrote, in a document she signed, and he handed that bill to the daughter who was just trying to do what their mother asked.

He lost on the facts. He lost on the math. He lost on the law. And somewhere in a file cabinet, there is presumably a very detailed invoice proving exactly how much his losing cost him.

We protected our client. The court confirmed she had administered the trust properly. The accounts were awarded to her as co-owner — not to the brothers. The million-dollar fee demand went nowhere. She received her discharge. A complete vindication.

And yet.

The years of torment. The depositions and accusations. The family, shattered along fault lines that were probably always there, just waiting for the right pressure. The grief that never got to be grief because it got hijacked so fast by someone who confused aggression with strength.

I’ve sat across the table from a lot of people in pain. Grief does strange things. It makes people feel like fighting is the same as honoring someone. Like winning proves something about who was loved more. Sometimes there’s a kernel of legitimate grievance buried inside all of it. More often, there isn’t.

What I know is this: a well-drafted trust, properly funded, with clear instructions and a thoughtful choice of trustee, doesn’t prevent grief. But it can prevent a war. It gives your family a map instead of a minefield. It makes the instructions so clear that even a bare-knuckle litigator with a calculator and a grudge has a hard time finding the opening.

The brother in this story invoiced his own grief at partner rates, argued against math, lost on every count, and walked away having spent more money proving he was wrong than most people make in a decade.

Your estate plan won’t prevent your family from feeling pain when you’re gone. Nothing will. But it can make sure that pain doesn’t come with a billing rate attached.

I’m Scott Schomer. I’ve spent decades as an estate planning attorney, a trial court advocate, and a professor of Trusts and Wills at Loyola Law School. I’ve sat with families in their best moments and their worst ones. I started TrustProf because I kept seeing the same thing: people who worked their whole lives to build something, and never got around to protecting it. I write here twice a month. If this landed, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

When you’re ready to make sure your family gets a map instead of a minefield, visit www.schomerlawgroup.com or call (310) 337-7696.

Ranch house. Circular driveway. The kind of place that suggests the person inside made good decisions and stuck with them. A half-door at the entrance, the top half open, the way you see in farmhouses and old movies about people who trust their neighbors

Before I could ring the bell, a woman appeared. Early seventies. Short haircut. Bright eyes. The kind of person who makes you feel welcome before she’s said a word.

“You must be Scott.”

“I am.”

“I’m Grace. We’ve been expecting you. Come on back — everyone’s outside.”

She led me through the house to the backyard, where her two daughters sat around a patio table near the pool. Trees and shrubs framing the yard. Iced tea already poured. A scene so composed it could have been staged.

I was there because Grace’s daughters had filed a conservatorship petition. They were asking the court to appoint someone to manage their mother’s finances and healthcare. They were worried she could no longer do it safely on her own. The court had appointed me to represent Grace — not the daughters, not the family, not the outcome anyone preferred. Grace.

I introduced myself, made some small talk, and then asked Grace directly how she felt about the conservatorship.

She looked at me with polite, genuine confusion.

“Conservatorship? Nobody told me about a conservatorship.”

Around the table, her daughters exhaled in unison. Not angry. Not surprised. The way people exhale when something happens exactly as they expected, for the hundredth time, and they have simply run out of reactions.

I was still new enough to the moment that I thought I could fix it with clarity.

“Grace,” I said, “a conservatorship is a court proceeding. Your daughters have filed a petition asking a judge to appoint someone to help manage your finances and healthcare decisions. They’re concerned about your safety.”

I walked her through it carefully. I used plain language. I made eye contact. I asked if she had any questions.

She nodded.

“How do you feel about a conservatorship?” I asked.

She considered it for a moment.

“Conservatorship? What conservatorship?”

The daughters watched me figure out what they had already known for months. Every day had become groundhog day.

Grace wasn’t being difficult. She wasn’t in denial. She wasn’t trying to derail the proceedings or protect her autonomy through strategic confusion.

She was losing her short-term memory. Completely. Conversations didn’t fade — they vanished. Every few minutes the slate wiped clean, and Grace was back at the beginning of a morning she had no memory of starting.

I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and I still find myself unprepared for the specific quality of that kind of impairment. It doesn’t look the way people expect. Grace was warm, oriented, funny in the moment. She offered me more iced tea. She asked about my drive over. She was present in every way except one: she could not hold onto the thread of what we were discussing long enough to know we had already discussed it.

Over the following weeks, as we moved toward trial, I met with Grace several more times. Each visit, I came prepared. Each visit, we started in the same place.

“Conservatorship? What conservatorship?”

And every time, I started over. Patiently. Carefully. With the same plain language and the same genuine hope that this time the information might hold.

It never did.

My job, as her court-appointed attorney, was to represent her wishes. Grace was consistent about one thing: in the moments when the information landed, she didn’t want a conservatorship. She wanted to manage her own life.

The problem was that each objection existed in isolation. There was no accumulation. No ability to weigh what she’d said last week against what she felt today. Just a series of fresh reactions, each one arriving as if for the first time.

Meanwhile her daughters lived on the other side of that equation. They remembered everything. Every conversation. Every reset. Every moment of watching their mother arrive at the same confusion as if it were new. If Grace’s experience was a loop, theirs was a slow unraveling — fully witnessed, never forgotten.

We worked toward a compromise. Grace’s daughter would serve as co-conservator alongside her late husband’s trusted business partner. Oversight without completely sidelining the family. A structure that might actually hold.

On the morning of trial, I pulled Grace aside in the hallway outside the courtroom. Just the two of us. No audience.

I explained everything again.

And something happened that didn’t always happen: she stayed with me. The information landed and held, at least for a few minutes. She understood the arrangement. She agreed it was reasonable. She said so clearly.

I wrote it out by hand. She signed it. I signed it. We walked into the courtroom together, and for a moment I let myself believe we’d found our way through.

The judge, with his magnificent gray mane, had the measured calm of someone who had seen most things twice. He looked down at us and asked whether we were proceeding to trial.

“Good news, Your Honor,” I said. “We’ve reached a resolution. My client has agreed to the conservatorship, with co-conservators.”

The judge nodded, pleased. He turned to Grace.

“Ma’am, do you understand that we’re here today to determine whether a conservatorship should be established over your person and estate?”

Grace looked up at him with those bright eyes.

“Conservatorship? What conservatorship?”

We went to trial.

There was no other path. Grace took the stand. Her daughters had to put her there. I did what I could to honor her position, but there is a limit to what you can do when your client cannot remember the question you just asked her.

Her testimony drifted. She repeated herself. She apologized without knowing why. She tried to answer questions that had lost their context by the time she reached the end of the sentence. And yet — and this is the part that stays with me — she knew something was wrong. She just couldn’t hold onto it long enough to name it.

The court reached the right conclusion. A conservatorship was necessary. Not because Grace was uncooperative or incapable of expressing a preference. But because a preference you cannot remember having is not a decision you can act on.

Capacity cases are the hardest work I do. Not legally — the legal standards are reasonably clear. Hard in the human sense. Because impairment doesn’t announce itself cleanly. It arrives unevenly. Quietly. In the same words, repeated.

Sometimes it looks like confusion. Sometimes it looks like stubbornness. Sometimes it looks like a perfectly pleasant woman offering you iced tea in a well-kept backyard — until you realize you’ve had this exact conversation before. Multiple times. And she has no idea.

The law asks a deceptively simple question: at what point does someone lose the right to manage their own life?

Cases like Grace’s reveal why the answer is never simple. The issue isn’t always whether someone can decide.

Sometimes it’s whether they can remember that they decided at all.

Grace’s story is one I carry. Not because it ended badly — it didn’t. The arrangement held. Her daughters did right by her. But because it taught me something about the nature of autonomy that no law school course ever quite captures.

Independence isn’t always lost in a dramatic moment. Sometimes it repeats itself out of existence. Quietly. Politely. Over iced tea, in a beautiful backyard, on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning.

Scott Schomer is a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Law Group and Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. TrustProf publishes twice a month. If this one stayed with you, subscribe below — and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

I have been doing this work for a long time. I have seen things.

My favorite came across my desk years ago. A handwritten holographic will — perfectly legal in California, by the way, requiring nothing more than the testator’s own hand and signature — that included this instruction:

“Under no circumstances is anything of mine to find its way to my former husband … and his company of whores, tarts, and sluts.”

Clear. Direct. Difficult to misinterpret.

Legally speaking, the identical result could have been achieved with a single quiet sentence: “I intentionally make no provision for my former husband.” Same outcome. No theater. No immortalized fury.

But some people see their will as one final opportunity. A chance to say the thing they never quite got to say. A literary drive-by, executed from a safe distance of approximately forever.

I understand the impulse. I do. Behind every scorched-earth will is a real story. A real betrayal. Years of something that felt unresolved, unfair, and unanswered. The law gave them one last microphone and they were not about to walk past it without saying something.

But then there is the other kind.

There is a will that has circulated among estate planning attorneys for years — its author lost to history but its wit very much alive — that understood the sharpest blade makes the smallest sound.¹

“To my wife I leave her lover, and the knowledge that I was not the fool she thought me.”

“To my son I leave the pleasure of earning a living. For twenty years, he thought the pleasure was mine.”

Read that twice.

No profanity. No theater. Just two sentences that will follow their recipients for the rest of their lives like a very quiet, very well-dressed ghost. Whoever wrote that understood something that most people don’t — that precision is more devastating than volume, and that the best revenge, if revenge is what you’re after, arrives in a whisper.

I have thought about these wills for years. The furious one and the elegant one. What they share is more interesting than what separates them. Both writers were still in the room, long after they had left it. Still fighting a battle. Still needing the last word.

Marcus Aurelius had a simpler approach. He wrote: “You don’t have to have an opinion about everything.”

He was talking about Stoic philosophy. But he might as well have been talking about estate planning.

Here is what I have learned sitting across from people at the most vulnerable and clarifying moments of their lives: the ones who arrive with scores to settle almost never feel better afterward. The will gets signed. The fury gets notarized. And the person driving home still carries everything they brought in.

Your will is not a courtroom. It is not a confessional. It is not a final press release.

It is a letter to the people you love, written in a language that has legal force. The question worth asking — before you write a single word of it — is what you actually want them to feel when they read it.

Marcus Aurelius again: “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

Sometimes the best final word is no editorial at all.

When your song ends, does the next verse know the tune?

¹ This will and its provisions are cited in Judith G. McMullen, Keeping Peace in the Family While You Are Resting in Peace: Making Sense of and Preventing Will Contests, 8 Marq. Elder’s Advisor 61, 85 (2006). The original author remains unknown.

Marie-Thérèse was 85 years old. She had given up her pension, her apartment in western France, the life she’d built over decades — all of it — to move to Anniston, Alabama, and marry Bill Ross, the G.I. she’d met when she was a young secretary and he was stationed near her hometown in the late 1950s. They’d found each other again after both their spouses had died. Her children found it a little awkward at first, the way adult children sometimes do. But they watched the wedding online from France and were glad she’d found a second youth.

Then Bill died in January. Unexpectedly. At 85.

And three months later, ICE agents came to the house on a quiet street called Gann Drive and arrested Marie-Thérèse in her nightgown.

The story broke last week in the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/us/ice-detention-alabama-french-woman.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share. I read it twice. Then I sat with it for a while before I could write about it.

She is now in a detention center in Louisiana. Her children in France cannot reach her. The detention center doesn’t accept international calls. Her neighbors in Anniston — strangers, really — have rallied to her side, bringing her food and filing affidavits and calling her “Unsinkable Molly” after the Titanic survivor. The French consulate is working to free her.

The probate judge overseeing the estate — a woman named Shirley Millwood — reviewed the evidence and concluded that one of Bill’s sons, a retired state trooper who now works at a federal courthouse, had used his position to orchestrate the arrest. The son denies it. But the judge noted that he received a text confirming the arrest less than an hour after it happened. Two hours after that, his brother showed up and changed the locks.

I want to be careful here. I don’t know the sons. I wasn’t in that courtroom. People do terrible things in grief, and grief and greed are hard to tell apart from the outside.

But I’ve been practicing estate law in California for a long time. I’ve sat across from hundreds of families. And what I can tell you is this: the shape of this story is not unusual. The details are extreme. The suffering is real and specific and breaks your heart. But the underlying dynamic — a blended family, no will, modest assets, a late-in-life marriage that the first family never fully accepted — plays out in probate courts every week.

Bill Ross owned a house worth about $173,000, two cars, and a bank account with $1,500 in it. That’s it. That was the estate. And over that, a woman who gave up everything to be with the man she loved now sits alone in a detention center in Louisiana, unable to speak to her children.

The weapons have changed over the years. I’ve watched the arsenal expand. It used to be handwritten notes and whispered accusations. Now it’s control over the mail. Changing the locks. Cutting off internet and utilities. And, in cases where someone has the access and the will to do it, a phone call to the right government office.

Good planning doesn’t eliminate conflict between people who are determined to fight. Nothing does. Human nature is stubborn that way, and I stopped believing in miracles somewhere around my third contested probate.

But a solid plan — a real one, done thoughtfully, with the right documents and the right structure — removes the tools that turn family tension into something catastrophic. It establishes who has authority before anyone is dead and someone else decides to claim it. It makes clear what the surviving spouse is entitled to, so there’s no room to offer her $10,000 and a plane ticket home and call it fair. It closes the gaps that bad actors crawl through.

Bill Ross didn’t have a will. Under Alabama law, his wife was entitled to half his estate. That right existed. But without a plan, without documentation, without a structure in place before he died, enforcing that right meant going to court. And while she was going to court, someone cut off her internet and rerouted her mail and she missed an immigration appointment.

The plan should have come before the fight. It almost always should.

I think about Marie-Thérèse on the flight across the Atlantic, watching the coastline of France recede through the window. Thinking about Bill waiting for her. Thinking about the house with the backyard pool and the drives to Florida and the plans they’d made.

She brought nothing but herself. That was enough, until it wasn’t.

If someone you love is in a second marriage, or a blended family, or a situation where the loyalties are complicated and the assets are modest and everyone is one bad moment away from a very bad decision — please. Don’t wait for the song to end before you figure out who knows the tune.

TrustProf is written by Scott Schomer, a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Law Group and Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. If you want to talk about building a plan that protects your family before they need it, visit schomerlawgroup.com or call (310) 337-7696.

Actor Alain Delon died on August 18, 2024. He was 88 years old, impossibly handsome to the end, and in his will he asked to be buried with his dog, Loubo.

Loubo was still alive.

Thankfully, for Loubo and the rest of us, his administrators refused. Some requests belong in a French art film. Not the Probate Code.

I’ve been doing this work long enough to have heard my share of impossible requests. Can you make sure my kids never fight? Can I leave everything to my lucky fishing hat? Can I come back and haunt my brother-in-law if he sells the house?

The answer, in each case, is some version of no. Estate planning is powerful but it is not magic. We can help you avoid probate, plan for incapacity, protect your assets, and carry your intentions forward long after you are gone. But we cannot legislate family harmony, protect fishing hats from estate sales, or license haunting.

Then there was Zelda.

More than a decade ago, Zelda came to me with a request that could have sounded, on the surface, like the others. She wanted her entire estate held in trust. For the dogs.

Not one dog. Not a bequest to the Humane Society or a donation to a rescue organization with a nice website and a charity rating. She wanted her estate to support the shelter she had built. The one she owned. The one where, instead of kennels and cages and concrete runs, the dogs simply ran free.

She had acquired a warehouse in Los Angeles. It was slightly raggedy, but a real warehouse. The kind of space most people in this city dream about converting into lofts or production studios or something with exposed brick and a cold brew tap. Zelda converted it into something else entirely. She took the square footage that this city prices like gold and gave it to animals nobody else wanted.

No cages. No runs. Just space. Just dogs, being dogs, in a city that doesn’t always make room for that.

This was before the concept had a name. Before the Instagram accounts and the breathless magazine profiles and the waiting lists. Zelda was doing it before it was a thing, the way the best ideas always arrive — quietly, stubbornly, ahead of their time.

She knew exactly what she had built. She knew exactly what she wanted to happen to it when she was gone. And she sat across from me with the calm certainty of someone who has already made her peace with the important questions and just needs someone to handle the paperwork.

I want to be honest about something. A request like this is not simple. A homemade animal shelter — even a visionary one, even a warehouse full of dogs running free in Los Angeles — presents real legal complexity. How do you structure a trust to sustain an operating facility? Who serves as trustee? How do you build in enough flexibility to handle the unexpected without losing fidelity to the donor’s intent? What happens when the building needs a new roof, or the city changes its zoning rules, or the cost of kibble goes up?

These are not small questions. They are the questions that separate a wish from a plan.

We made it work for Zelda.

The structure exists. The intent is protected. And somewhere in Los Angeles right now there is a warehouse full of dogs who have no idea that a woman they never met decided they mattered enough to plan for. They are just running. The way she always wanted them to.

I think about Zelda when people tell me estate planning is about avoiding taxes or staying out of probate. Those things are true. They matter. But they are not the whole story.

The whole story is that every person who walks into my office carries something they love. Something they built, or rescued, or believed in before anyone else did. Something they are not ready to leave behind without a fight.

My job is to make sure the fight is already won before they have to leave.

Alain Delon wanted to take his dog with him.

Zelda wanted to make sure hers would be fine without her.

One of those is a French art film. The other one is a life well planned.

When your song ends, does the next verse know the tune?

If you know Detroit you know what that means. You grow up with music in the walls — not as background noise but as something the city produces the way it produces cars. Motown was not a record label where I came from. It was the air.

And like a lot of kids who grew up there I had a dream that pointed west. California. The sun. The surf. The open road. Tom Petty understood that dream better than almost anyone. He was a Florida boy who made it to California and then spent his career writing about the longing that brought him there and the freedom he found when he arrived.

I eventually made it too. And I brought with me a love of music and cars and the particular California feeling that Tom spent his life trying to put into words.

A few years ago my wife and I drove up into the hills above Malibu on a Sunday morning. She grew up in the San Fernando Valley — the real Valley, the kind where the music industry was not an abstraction but a neighborhood. Names that meant something in rock and roll were just her neighbors and friends.

We were going to an estate sale. Tom Petty’s estate sale.

By the time we arrived most of the memorabilia was gone. The guitars. The stage lights. The stories. What remained was the furniture. A few quiet corners of a life once lived loud.

And then — laid out on a table among the last remnants of his bookshelf — we saw something unexpected.

Books on child development. Parenting guides. Notes for raising the next generation.

Even rock stars, it turns out, worry about the big stuff. Legacy. Responsibility. Love.

I stood there for a long moment thinking about what it means to spend a lifetime building something. The songs. The tours. The houses in the hills. The carefully chosen cars that spoke to a man who never forgot where the open road had taken him.

And then I thought about what was left on that table.

Not the platinum records. Not the stage gear. The books about raising children well.

It was a simple reminder that behind every legend is just a person trying to do right by the people they leave behind.

We did not leave with anything from the house that day. But we walked away with something we have never forgotten.

The things we strive so hard to achieve — the houses, the cars, the careers, the accumulated evidence of a life fully lived — are things we cannot take with us.

What we can leave behind is everything else. The values. The resources. The structures that allow the people we love to carry forward what we built.

That is not a legal document. That is a decision. And it is one that most people put off until it is too late to make it well.

Tom’s music carried on. His daughter carried the vision. His son built a career of his own.

That is legacy. Not a plaque. Not a headstone. A continuation.

When your song ends, does the next verse know the tune?

TrustProf is a newsletter about legacy, law, and what we leave behind. I am Scott Schomer — a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, founder of Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors and Schomer Law Group, and Adjunct Professor of Trusts & Wills at Loyola Law School. I write here twice a month. If this resonated, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

If you are ready to start building a plan that actually protects your family, visit www.schomerlawgroup.com or call us at (310) 337-7696.