An irrevocable trust means giving up control of the property permanently. Not mostly. Not with a workaround your nephew read about. Permanently, in exchange for the asset no longer being treated as yours.
For some families that trade is worth making. For a lot of the people who get sold one at a hotel seminar, it is not.
Revocable and irrevocable are not variations on a theme
A revocable living trust is the ordinary California estate planning instrument. You keep control, you can amend it Tuesday and again in April, and the assets in it are still yours for eligibility purposes. Its main value in this area is avoiding probate, which is what keeps assets out of the reach of estate recovery.
An irrevocable trust is a different animal. You transfer property out of your own hands. You do not get to change your mind because your daughter's marriage went sideways or you decided you want the house back.
The sentence people skip
If your plan depends on being able to get the property back later, an irrevocable trust is the wrong tool and probably an ineffective one. Trusts that leave the grantor with too much practical control tend to be treated as what they actually are, and the person paying for that discovery is the family.
Where the current uncertainty bites
Funding an irrevocable trust means transferring assets into it, and transfers are the unsettled part of California Medi-Cal right now. The asset test came back on January 1, 2026, and the treatment of transfers is still being sorted out. That does not make irrevocable trusts useless. It does mean the timing analysis, which is the whole point of the strategy, has to be built on current guidance and not on an article from 2019.
“I sit through the occasional competitor's seminar. There is always a slide with a house on it and an arrow, and there is never a slide about the son who cannot access his mother's money when she needs a new roof. I sell irrevocable trusts perhaps four or five times a year. I am asked about them roughly weekly.”
Delia Vasquez-HartWhen it genuinely fits
- The person is planning years ahead of any anticipated need, not in a crisis this month
- The assets in question are surplus to what they will need for their own life
- There is a trustee the family actually trusts, which is a higher bar than families admit
- Nobody is depending on being able to reverse the decision
When it does not
- A parent already in a facility with a pending application
- The family's only real asset is the home the parent still lives in and needs
- There is any live disagreement among the children about who manages what
- The person signing does not fully follow what they are giving up
That last one is not a technicality. Capacity is required to sign, and beyond the legal standard there is a plain human standard I hold myself to. If the person across the table cannot explain the trade back to me in their own words, I do not draft it.
Questions we get asked
Can I be the trustee of my own irrevocable trust?
Retaining too much control tends to undercut the point of the structure. Who serves as trustee is one of the central design questions, not a detail to settle later.
Can I still live in the house?
Arrangements exist that address occupancy, but they come with conditions and they are not a way to have the transfer both ways. Any promise that you keep the house in every practical sense while it stops being yours deserves suspicion.
Is a revocable living trust enough for Medi-Cal?
For estate recovery, often yes, because a funded revocable trust keeps assets out of probate and recovery reaches only the probate estate. For eligibility, no. Assets in a revocable trust are still counted as yours.
How long before applying should an irrevocable trust be funded?
That is the transfer timing question, and it is genuinely unsettled after the January 2026 reinstatement. Current guidance has to be confirmed rather than assumed.
Before you sign anything anyone handed you at a seminar, bring the draft to a free 45-minute consultation and let us read it with you. Sometimes the answer is that it is fine. Sometimes it is not, and the good news is that unsigned paper costs nothing to walk away from.