Mortgage, property taxes, insurance, HOA, any solar payment, and any liens against the property, added into one monthly number and measured against the 36% to 43% DTI range lenders actually use.
What the tax bill is if you qualify for the exclusion and what it is if you don't, per month, calculated from the home's actual assessed value rather than a guess. Plus the one year deadline to file.
What it would cost each month to cash out a co-owner through a structured refinance, based on your ownership share and the home's real value, not a number argued over at Thanksgiving.
If keeping it doesn't pencil out, you get the number that does: what your share of the equity could put you into, and where. What they left you doesn't disappear. It just takes a different shape.
The market value, the assessed value, and the property details come back automatically from public records. No appraisal, no paperwork, nothing to dig up first.
Income, the existing mortgage, condition, and who else is on title. About three minutes, and estimates are fine. You do not need exact figures to get a useful answer.
A personalized PDF with the monthly cost, the buyout math, and your Prop 19 scenarios. And if the money you inherited is still tied up in the estate, that is a financing problem, not a dead end.
A free tool from Scott Stollar, C.A.R. Certified Probate and Trust Specialist, that runs the real numbers on a California home you inherited: what it costs to keep every month, what it would take to buy out a co-owner, and your Prop 19 tax scenarios side by side. It works whether you inherited the house on your own or with others. If the numbers don't support keeping it, it shows you what your share of the equity could do instead. Enter the address and a few details and get a personalized PDF in about three minutes.
More than the mortgage. Property taxes that may reset, homeowners insurance, any HOA dues, a solar payment or lease, liens against the property, and the repairs that have been waiting. The Snapshot totals all of it into one monthly figure and measures it against the 36% to 43% debt to income range lenders actually use, so you know whether keeping it clears the bar before you build a plan around it.
One of you ends up with the house. The others get paid their share of what it is worth. The amount depends on the home's value, your ownership share, and any existing mortgage or liens.
How you get there depends on whether the home is in a trust or going through probate. Those two run on different rules, different timelines, and different paperwork, and the order things happen in affects your property taxes. That is worth sorting out with your attorney before anyone signs anything.
The Snapshot gives you the monthly payment and the cash required, so you walk into that conversation already knowing the numbers.
Nobody tells you this part. The money you inherited may be your down payment, and the court may sit on it for months. That is not a dead end, it is a financing problem. It is also why I work with Paul Newell and Courtney Wittner. They deal with estate money that has not been released yet. A standard purchase loan does not. If you want, the Snapshot can send them your numbers so they can come back with options.
Yes. A lot.
Your parents may have paid low property taxes because they owned the home a long time. Prop 19 lets you keep some of that low rate, but only if the house becomes your main home, and only up to a limit set by the state. The California State Board of Equalization explains the limit in its Proposition 19 Fact Sheet, Publication 801.
Here is the part that surprises people. How you pay the other owners changes your taxes.
If you take ownership together first, and then buy them out with your own money or a loan in your own name, the state counts that as buying from another owner. Not as inheriting from a parent. The part you bought gets taxed at today's value.
That is not my opinion. The California State Board of Equalization says a payment like that "constitutes payment for the interest of the other beneficiary, in effect, a 'purchase'." You can read it yourself in Property Tax Annotation 625.0235.005.
There are other ways to structure it that can protect more of the low rate. Which one fits depends on your trust, your family, and who borrows the money. It is not the same for everyone.
So talk to your CPA and your estate attorney before you sign any loan documents. The order you do things in can cost thousands of dollars a year, and it is very hard to undo afterward.
The Snapshot shows you both tax scenarios in dollars per month, using your home's real assessed value.
That's common, and it's usually not a values problem, it's a numbers problem. Once everyone can see the same real numbers instead of guesses, most families find their way to a decision that works. That's what the Snapshot is for.
