Regale a tu familia el regalo de un plan patrimonial.

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp speaks with attorney Jill Mastroianni, the host of the Death Readiness podcast, about how to protect your assets, your family, and yourself with an updated estate plan. Also discussed in this episode:

• Interest rates all over the world are rising, and bond prices are falling.
• Are you getting your money’s worth from your financial advisor?
• After more than 25 years, Intel finally exceeded its dot-com peak.
• One widow knew exactly what to do when her husband died because he created and regularly updated a “Letter From Your Dead Husband” while he was still alive.

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A full transcript is below.

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Robert Brokamp: How to prepare for when you're not able to manage your money temporarily or eternally. That and more on this Saturday’s Personal Finance edition of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast. I'm Robert Brokamp, and this week, I speak with Attorney Jill Mastroianni about why you and everyone in your family should get an estate plan.

But first, some headlines from the past week, starting with interest rates jumping to levels not seen in years. The yield on the 10-year treasury reached 4.6%, and the yield on the 30-year treasury got over 5.2%. The highest rate in two decades. Perhaps most noteworthy is that the yield on the two-year treasury has spiked from 3.4% before the start of the war in Iran to now over 4%. The two-year treasury is often considered the bond market's prediction of where the Federal Reserve will or should be headed. If it's right, the Fed will more likely to be raising rates than cutting them over the next year or so. Higher rates aren't an American phenomena. Yields around the world are going up. For example, yields in Germany are at levels not seen since 2011. In the UK, rates are as high as they were in 2008, and in Japan, rates are at levels not seen since 1997. The global bond market is likely responding to rising inflation and rising government indebtedness, both of which can increase the riskiness of bonds, leading some investors to sell their bonds and prospective investors to demand higher rates to compensate for the risks.

As rates rise, bond prices fall, which is why the overall bond market is actually down slightly for the year. It's because at times like these that I believe you should keep any money you need in the next year or two in cash and not in stocks or bonds. To find high-yielding savings accounts for your cash, visit Motley Fool Money at fool.com/money. Now, rising rates also means that it costs more to borrow money. The rate on the 30-year mortgage is up to 6.7%, according to Mortgage News Daily, after beginning of the year at 6.2%. The share of new mortgage applications that are adjustable-rate mortgages has reached the highest level of the year at almost 10%.

Our next item comes from an article on Real Clare Markets from Don Chance with the headline, “Your Financial Advisor May Cost More Than Your Doctor. “Here's the math. An annual physical, including blood work and X-rays, costs roughly $400, while a client with $100,000 in assets, paying the standard 1% advisory fee, pays $1,000 a year. A client with $500,000 pays $5,000 a year, and that figure keeps going up along with the level of assets. The article argues that the advisory industry thrives on economies of scale that benefit the advisor and not the client. As Vanguard founder John Bogle observed, managing twice as much money costs the firm essentially the same, yet fees scale with assets anyway. In the article, Mr. Chance does acknowledge that advisors do provide value, particularly in behavioral coaching, keeping clients invested through volatility, retirement projections, other financial planning services. I agree, which is why I often recommend that even dedicated do-it-yourselfers first check in with a financial planner every five to 10 years or so, maybe right before you retire, to get that expert, objective second opinion. But if you're paying an advisor an annual fee based on the level of assets, calculate how much that's actually costing you and determine whether those fees are good investment. Also consider an advisor who charges by the hour or project, or maybe a flat annual fee.

Now for the number of the week, which is more than 25 years, that's how long it took for Intel stock to finally exceed its dot-com peak. Share price hit $75 in August of 2000, but then began a long slump, reaching as low as $12 a share in 2009. However, since the end of March of this year, Intel stock has almost tripled to $118 as of this taping on the morning of May 21, finally blowing past its previous all-time high set more than a quarter century ago. It's yet another illustration that while the overall U.S. stock market has always recovered from bear markets, usually within two to three years, individual stocks are a different story. If you're going to own them, stay very diversified, especially if you're not quite yet an experienced investor, and consider complementing your stocks with a collection of low-cost index funds. Up next, what should be included in your estate plan, when Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing continues.

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Robert Brokamp: Hello. My friends, I have bad news. You and everyone you know, at some point, is going to pass away. Before then, you or the people you love may become physically or mentally incapacitated. But despite these certainties and possibilities, most people don't have an estate plan, and if they do, it's often outdated. Here to explain how you can protect yourself, your family, and your assets with an estate plan is Attorney Jill Mastroianni, the host of the Death Readiness Podcast. Jill, welcome to the show.

Jill Mastroianni: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Robert Brokamp: Let's start with the basics. What's your definition of estate planning?

Jill Mastroianni: First, I would say, figuring out what is going to happen to you if you can't take care of yourself. Then, as a secondary matter, figuring out what's going to happen to your stuff when you're no longer alive.

Robert Brokamp: That involves all kinds of things. You think about everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you take care of, and as well as everything you own. If you don't have an estate plan, what happens when someone dies or becomes incapacitated without it?

Jill Mastroianni: If you become incapacitated without an estate plan, then there's a process called getting a conservatorship or guardianship, where the court determines who is going to be responsible for making decisions for you. This process is long, and it's often quite expensive. If you're going to see a family disagree, this is where they're going to disagree the most because it's someone taking care of not only financial matters, but also taking care of medical decisions. A lot of people disagree about how that should go.

Robert Brokamp: I think that you're highlighting one of the most important points of estate plan. A lot of people think in terms of money, costs, lawyers, but one of the biggest things that it will accomplish is, if you have an estate plan, you're going to avoid a lot of family strife.

Jill Mastroianni: Yes, and I have found that people are more willing to accept decisions that you might have made about your end-of-life care or who you want to be making decisions on your behalf. If you have those conversations with your family in advance, so it's not as, I chose my son, but maybe everyone else is thinking, oh, it's 'cause he pressured me to choose him. But if I have those conversations in advance with the entire family as to what I did and why I did it, people are more likely to accept that decision.

Robert Brokamp: What happens if someone passes away without an estate plan?

Jill Mastroianni: There's always a plan. It's not as if someone dies, and then we wonder forever what is going to happen to their stuff. There is a plan. For assets that you own jointly with somebody else with a right of survivorship, then that asset is going to go automatically to the joint owner. For an asset like a retirement account like an IRA or 401(k), you might have a beneficiary designation. Like, I have named my husband as my designated beneficiary. That's going to go straight to him without anybody doing anything. But those assets that I own individually in my own name, or I haven't named any type of beneficiary. That's going to go through a process called probate, which is a court-administrative process to figure out where your stuff should go. If you don't have a will, then the state essentially creates one for you and says, who among your family members gets those probate assets.

Robert Brokamp: That's an important point in that when it comes to the laws about estate planning, it's very specific to the state. If someone living in Virginia, like I do, may have a different situation than someone who lives in another state, Michigan, Tennessee, California, because each state has their own laws.

Jill Mastroianni: Each state has its own laws, and what I was surprised to learn about Michigan, where I live now, is that if I am married and I do not have children, but I do have a surviving parent, then the state says that my assets don't go to my surviving spouse. They also go partly to my surviving parent or parents, and that is not the case in Tennessee, where I practice.

Robert Brokamp: Some other aspects that some folks may want to consider when it comes to estate planning is, for example, what would happen to my kids if my kids are minors when I pass away. Maybe who will be the executor of my estate? What I want to happen to me when I pass away in terms of my funeral expenses, and where I want to be buried. All these other things that perhaps people either aren't thinking about or don't want to think about, but are decisions that have to be made.

Jill Mastroianni: There are so many decisions that have to be made that I think it causes some paralysis, and people don't start because they don't know where to begin. For example, I think a lot of young couples, they don't plan because they can't agree on who the guardian of their young children should be. But that decision it's far more unlikely to happen than, say, one parent dying. If you don't plan for the event of that one parent dying, then you've got a situation where you've got a young surviving spouse who's splitting the assets among their minor children and themselves. What I try to tell people is do not try to figure out everything 100%. Start, make the decisions that you can, and you're far better off than having made no decisions at all.

Robert Brokamp: If someone listening to this says, it's about time I got my estate plan or maybe my estate plan is pretty old, what's the first step they should take to get an updated estate plan?

Jill Mastroianni: The first thing I always tell people to do is start with the information that's available to you. You don't need to go and hire an estate planning attorney right off the bat. Figure out what you own, how you own it, whether you own it jointly or whether you own it individually, and figure out whether you have any beneficiary designations or payable on death transfers, for example, on a bank account. Because I would hate for someone to say, I know I need a will. I'm going to go to an attorney and get a will drafted. It turns out they don't even have any probate assets. There are no assets that are going to be governed by that will. For example, I do not have any probate assets. Everything is passing by joint ownership or beneficiary designation to my husband if I predecease him. If I got angry and changed my will and said he doesn't get anything, he still gets everything.

I think estate planning can be expensive. Make sure you understand whether you actually need what you're asking for, or you're going to see an attorney who can actually explain that to you. Because I think with estate planning, we hear so many: you should do this, you should do that. But I think where we need to take a step back is, I am an individual person, and maybe what I need is not the same thing that my cousin Bob needs or that my neighbor Joe says I should have done. Really figuring out what you need for yourself specifically and what makes sense to spend money on.

Robert Brokamp: People dig into this topic, they're going to learn about probate, and you mentioned that you won't have any assets that pass through probate. That seems to be a common goal. Tell us a little bit more about probate and why someone might avoid it. Do you think, in some cases, people are taking extreme steps to avoid probate?

Jill Mastroianni: I t