Jill Mastroianni
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 23 May
Jill Mastroianni’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So that's just going to go straight to him without anybody doing anything.
But those assets that I own individually in my own name where 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.
And 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?
Right.
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 just 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.
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.
And 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.
So what I try to tell people is,
Do not try to figure out everything 100%.
Just start, make the decisions that you can, and you're far better off than having made no decisions at all.
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, okay, I know I need a will.
I'm going to go to attorney and get a will drafted.
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