Your kids do not want your house. They want a house.
Most people plan to leave their home to their children. It is the default. It is what their own parents did, and it feels like the responsible thing.
Ask an estate attorney what actually happens next and you get a different picture. The children loved that house. They grew up in it. And they are settled somewhere else already, near their jobs and near their own children schools. So the house gets sold, usually within a year, and the proceeds arrive when those children are in their fifties or sixties and no longer need the help.
The timing is the whole problem
Help at thirty buys thirty years of ownership. An inheritance at sixty helps somebody retire a little earlier. Same money, and a completely different life.
The thing your children need is not the house you own. It is the value trapped inside it, moved to a neighborhood they already picked, at a price they cannot reach alone.
And you get to watch it work
That is the part nobody talks about. If the transfer happens while you are alive, you are standing in a driveway watching grandchildren run into a house you helped make happen. If it happens the usual way, you are a paragraph in a document somebody reads out loud.
The whole list, in one hour, on August 27
Forty ways, twelve covered in depth on stage, and a broker, a lender, a CPA, and a trusts and probate attorney answering questions from the room. Free, in Folsom.