Watch This Lesson
Buy a dining table and you can see where the money went. You eat at it. You touch it. The cost and the value arrive on the same day.
An estate plan gives you paper in a drawer. You will never use it. By the time it does anything, you are either incapacitated or gone, and somebody else experiences the benefit. That is a genuinely difficult thing to spend money on, and it is why so many people who fully intend to do this still have not.
Okay, so let’s talk about making an investment in your estate planning. Whether you use a will or a trust, let’s just talk about that for a minute. Because at the end of the day, it does take time and it does take money. And it does take like some brain energy into getting this done… It’s not something tangible that you can see. You’re spending money on something that you really don’t see the value of right now… But it’s an investment into your future and into your future beneficiaries.
The way out of that trap is to stop comparing the cost of the document and start comparing the total cost of the transfer.
What the Cheaper Option Actually Costs
A will-based plan is the inexpensive choice at the front end. Depending on where you live and how complicated your household is, drafting one with an attorney commonly runs several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. Compared to a trust package, which commonly runs from a few thousand into five figures for larger or blended estates, the will looks like the obvious value.
It looks that way because the second invoice has not arrived yet.
A will works by going through probate. Probate is a court proceeding, and it has its own costs: county filing fees, legally required published notices, personal representative compensation, appraisals of real property and personal property, and the attorney who handles the administration. Depending on the state and the estate, the total commonly lands somewhere in the range of 3% to 8% of the gross estate — more when real property in multiple states is involved, when heirs disagree, or when the estate is messy enough to require litigation.
Note what that percentage applies to: gross value, not net. A house with a mortgage is counted at its full value for purposes of these calculations in many jurisdictions, not at your equity.
So the real comparison is not a cheap plan versus an expensive plan. It is a small, predictable cost you pay now versus a larger, unpredictable cost your family pays later, out of their inheritance, during the worst year of their lives.
The Prince Example, Told Carefully
Renee uses Prince as her cautionary tale, and the core of the story is accurate and worth telling: one of the most successful musicians in American history died in 2016 with no will and no trust. His estate went into court, where it stayed for roughly six years, with heirs, creditors, and claimants litigating while nothing was distributed. By the time it resolved, a very substantial portion of the estate’s value had gone to taxes, legal fees, and administration rather than to his family.
One clarification, because it matters if you are trying to apply the lesson to your own situation: the largest single cost in Prince’s estate was federal and state estate tax, not probate fees. His estate was valued high enough to be taxed heavily. Probate costs were real and large, but they are a different line item, and conflating them overstates what probate alone will cost a typical family.
The transferable lessons from Prince are the ones that apply at any size: dying intestate hands the distribution decision to a statute and the timeline to a court; the delay itself has a cost, because assets sit unmanaged and unsold for years; and an estate with no plan attracts claimants, because there is no document to point at.
What the Upfront Investment Buys
Renee frames it as three returns, and the framing is useful:
So if you think about the money spent now, it does two things for your family in the future. Number one, it keeps them from having to be tied up in probate for a year. So it’s the time that you’re giving them back. It’s the money because we don’t know what the probate fees will be in the future… And then also, it’s just the peace of mind. It’s the ease of the transfer. It’s the ease of wrapping up your life.
Time. A will-based estate is typically tied up for somewhere between nine and eighteen months, and longer if anything is contested. A funded trust lets your successor trustee act immediately — pay bills, manage property, make distributions — without waiting for a court to grant authority.
Money. Whatever probate would have consumed stays in the estate. And there is a point in that quote worth underlining: you cannot know today what probate fees and court costs will be in twenty years. Paying a known cost now instead of an unknown cost later is itself worth something.
Effort, and privacy. Probate is public. Anyone can look up what you owned and who got it. It is also physical — filings and hearings happen in the county where you lived, which means your executor may be making trips to a courthouse in a state they do not live in. A successor trustee can administer a trust from anywhere, privately, without ever appearing in court.
That last one gets underestimated. If your children live in three different states, the practical burden of probate falls entirely on whichever one lives closest to your courthouse.
Where the Recaptured Money Could Go
This is the part of the lesson that reframes the whole decision.
Another thing when we talk about spending money now, another reason for that is it leaves more money in the estate if you have a charity in mind, if there’s some cause that you believe in… What if you recaptured that 10%? And what if you said, “Okay, you know what I could do with that money? I could make an impact into a charity or a cause I believe in or a church or whatever.” So you’re just redirecting money that you’re obviously not going to spend anyway… Let it go to the people and the causes you love instead of to the system.
The money that probate consumes is not money you were going to spend. It leaves your estate either way. The only question is whether it goes to filing fees, publication notices, appraisers, and administrators you never met — or to your church, a scholarship, a research foundation, a local organization, or simply more to your grandchildren.
Framed that way, the planning fee is not an expense at all. It is the cost of choosing the recipient.
The Question to Ask Instead
The question people bring in is: what does a will cost versus a trust, and which is the cheaper way to pass down my house?
The question that produces a better answer is: what is the total cost of transferring everything I own to the people I want to have it, and how much of that can I control?
Once you ask it that way, the arithmetic usually settles itself. You already accept this logic elsewhere — you fund a retirement account today for a benefit you receive decades from now. This is the same trade, with the benefit going to someone else.
What to Do This Month
- Get a real quote. Call two estate planning attorneys in your state and ask what a will-based plan and a trust-based plan would each cost for your situation. Guessing at the number is part of what keeps people stuck.
- Ask each one what probate typically costs and typically takes in your county. They know, and the answer is local.
- Add up your gross estate, including the full value of real property rather than your equity, and apply a range to it. That number is what is actually at stake.
- Decide where recaptured money should go, and name it in the document. A cause named specifically is more likely to receive something than a good intention.
- If cost is genuinely the obstacle, ask about doing it in stages — powers of attorney and a healthcare directive first, since those protect you while you are alive, then the distribution structure next.
The documents sit in a drawer and do nothing for years. That is not a sign you overpaid. That is the product working.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. All cost figures and percentage ranges are general illustrations only: attorney fees, probate costs, court timelines, and estate tax exposure vary substantially by state, county, estate size, and circumstances. References to the Prince estate are based on widely reported public accounts and are used for illustration, not as an audited accounting. Consult a licensed estate planning attorney in your state for an assessment of your own situation.
About the instructor: Renee Parris is an estate planning educator with over 30 years of experience. This article is a companion piece to Renee’s course, Estate Planning, Simplified.
