Damn. Another reason why New Mexico is awesome. My dad had quite a bit of cash and assets and it was no hassle. The cost of filing probate was 5 bucks lulz
Yeah I looked into this with a probate lawyer, since I do wills & trusts and estate planning which is a separate field than probate. Apparently in CA almost no one does probate stuff on their own because there's a ton of forms you need to fill out, file with the court, and give proper notice to anyone involved. New Mexico is probably a lot more lax on their forms for probate. If someone hires an attorney in CA to do the probate stuff, they can charge up to a maximum of 3% of the total worth of the estate they are probating. So if it's a small estate like 50k, it's not much money ($1500), whereas if it's a million bucks that's $30,000 just for some forms to be filled out; which is why people tend to want to avoid probate. A trust typically costs like $1500 to setup regardless of if the estate is worth $25,000 or 25 billion.
Also some people just don't want to deal with the court system at all. Having a trust lets people avoid filing anything. You just take the trust document to the banks, dmv, etc... and show it to them and they move the stuff into the beneficiaries name. It's pretty quick and easy.
I don't have a will or a trust because I own nothing of value besides my ultimate game &

collection. At some point I'm thinking about making one giving all my games to a Japanese kids charity (because 95% of my games are in Japanese so white kids would be emotionally scarred by the wacky jappy). If/When I pay off my mortgage for my Condo I'll have to figure out where I want that to go.