Core Documents
Revocable trusts, pour-over wills, durable powers of attorney, HIPAA authorizations, and coordinated beneficiary designations.
Estate Planning
The Practice
The most personal document
a family can create.
For more than four decades, Sanger & Molever has helped California families design and refresh estate plans that move thoughtfully across generations. Our clients include long-married couples building a first plan, blended families navigating second marriages, single parents protecting young beneficiaries, and family-business owners coordinating succession with the rest of their wealth picture.
We are not a document mill. The plans we draft are tailored to facts that took an hour to surface and decisions that took several meetings to make. The result is a plan that does what the family expected — not a plan that recites what the form contemplated.
The Foundation
Plans that hold up — legally, practically, emotionally.
Every comprehensive estate plan rests on a small set of foundational documents: a revocable trust, a pour-over will, durable powers of attorney for property and healthcare, HIPAA authorizations, and beneficiary designations coordinated with the trust by hand.
Around that core, every plan gains specific architecture — marital and bypass trusts, QTIP trusts for second marriages, generation-skipping dynasty structures, and disclaimer planning to keep the surviving spouse's options open.
Specific Matters We Handle
Six disciplines, one integrated practice.
Each engagement draws on the full breadth of the firm — from drafting through tax coordination and post-death administration — so a single matter is never siloed from the larger plan.
Transfer-Tax Planning
Annual exclusion gifting, ILITs, GRATs, intentionally defective grantor trusts, and installment sales to grantor trusts.
Blended Families
QTIP trusts, prenuptial coordination, and life-insurance structures that protect both spouses and children of prior marriages.
Special-Needs Planning
Third-party and first-party special needs trusts that supplement Medi-Cal and SSI without disqualifying the beneficiary.
Family-Business Coordination
Aligning buy-sell agreements, operating documents, and the trust so governance and succession move as one.
Generation-Skipping Plans
Dynasty trusts, GST allocations, and disclaimer planning designed to preserve assets across decades.
A Guiding Principle
"A good estate plan answers questions the family has already asked. A great one answers the questions they have not yet thought to ask."
Sanger & Molever
Blended Families
Provision for the spouse, certainty for the children.
Second marriages produce some of the most rewarding — and most difficult — estate planning work we do. The new spouse needs provision; the children of the prior marriage need certainty; the surviving spouse should not have unilateral power to redirect assets the deceased intended for the children.
We balance those interests through QTIP trusts, lifetime gifting, prenuptial and postnuptial coordination, and life insurance trusts that protect each side without forcing either to choose. The drafting is technical; the conversations are emotional.
Family-Business Coordination
The trust and the company, speaking the same language.
Where the family owns an operating business, the estate plan and the business documents must agree with each other. A buy-sell agreement that contradicts the trust will produce litigation; a trust that ignores the operating agreement will produce confused fiduciaries.
We coordinate both sides of the planning so they move as one — and we revisit the coordination whenever the family adds owners, sells real estate, or contemplates a generational transition.
Representative Engagement
A coordinated plan for a blended family.
A Coachella Valley couple in their late sixties — each with children from a prior marriage — engaged the firm to design an estate plan that would provide for the survivor while guaranteeing that each spouse's separate assets ultimately passed to that spouse's children. We drafted coordinated QTIP trusts, established an irrevocable life insurance trust to equalize the inheritance between the two sides, and coordinated retirement-account beneficiary designations to mirror the trust's intent. The plan was reviewed annually and refreshed twice over the next decade.
Explore Further
Estate planning, in detail.
Special Needs Trusts
Protecting eligibility for public benefits while supplementing the beneficiary's quality of life.
Fiduciary Accountings
Trustee and executor accountings prepared to California Probate Code standards.
Probate Administration
Full probate, summary procedures, and trust administration after death.
How We Work
Drafted, reviewed, and finalized at the family's pace.
New estate-planning engagements typically begin with a substantial intake meeting. We learn the family, catalog the assets, surface the priorities, and identify the difficult questions. We then draft, revisit the draft together, and finalize only when the family is comfortable that the plan reflects what they actually want.
Speak With Counsel
Discuss your matter
Whether you are creating your first plan or refreshing an existing one, initial conversations are unhurried and confidential.
