Financial markets are so radically different now as compared to before the 2008 global financial crisis that advisors have to rethink their retirement assumptions.

Retirement experts said on Wednesday that many of the rules of thumb used to save and invest before and during retirement no longer work at a discussion during the FPA BE 2016 Conference in Baltimore.

For one thing, advisors should dispense with the assumption that a portfolio mostly allocated to bonds or evenly split between stocks and bonds will be sufficient to see their clients through a successful retirement, said Dave Yeske, managing director at Yeskie-Buie in Vienna, Va., during the Retirement Realities panel discussion.

“One of the ways we’re handling the low-rate environment is that we hold more equities in retirement portfolios than most studies typically assume,” Yeske said. “When a client moves into retirement, whatever their stock-bond allocation has been, we move it to 70-30, and we only move that much into bonds because our thought is that we want to only use bonds as a stable reserve.”

A 30 percent allocation to bonds, along with allocations to dividend-paying equities, can create a bridge that can see retirement portfolos through market downturns, Yeske said.

At Douglas C. Lane & Associates in New York, partner Marc Milic said clients are also presented with retirement portfolios with a higher-than-typical allocation to equities.

“We’ve probably kept clients at the higher end of equity allocations than they thought their stomachs could tolerate,” Milic said. “That’s not only in response to lower rates, but also because of longevity needs.”

The panelists also took aim at the financial industry’s typical method for calculating the risk level of a retirement portfolio—the risk tolerance questionnaire.

David Blanchett, head of retirement research for Morningstar in Chicago, opined that risk tolerance questionnaires weren’t really measuring whether an investor was willing to take on risk.

“There are a combination of factors that go into risk preference, but risk tolerance questinnaires usually concentrate on how someone feels if the market goes down by a certain level,” Blanchett said. “The reality is that you can document a client’s preferences and take on additional risks. It could end up being the right decision and be the complete opposite of what a risk tolerance questionnaire’s results tell you to do.”

The slow-growth environment offers advisors an opportunity to further explore their clients’ risk capacity as they’re forced to look at riskier assets to generate returns.

“I find that presenting a lower return assumption uncovers a lot of intelligence surrounding my clients’ true gut feeling surrounding risk versus reward,” Milic said.

Milic is currently presenting clients with projected annual returns of 2.5 percent to 3 percent for bonds and total returns of 7 percent of equities over the next decad, but added that he might be underestimating stocks and overestimating fixed income.

The difficulty in planning around lower annual returns is compounded by increasing lifespans, said Milic.

“Most of us would probably conclude that we’re seeing this in our own practices: People are living well past the average life expectancy and into their 80s and 90s,” Milic said, adding that a higher allocation to equities generally means that a retirement portfolio could continue to grow and generate income if a client lives longer than they expect to.

With retirements lasting 30 or more years, a higher equity allocation also helps address inflation risk, said Yeske.

“The cost of living might double twice over the course of someone’s retirement,” Yeske said. “They’d better have some growth in that portfolio.”

Milic said he was currently planning retirement portfolios for life expectancies of 100 years old, but wondered if advisors should start planning for lives beyond the centenarian mark.

Blanchett, on the other hand, warned that factoring in too much longevity could lead to undesired results.

“If we’re running retirement projections for age 100 with a 95 percent success rate, we’re going to be planning very expensive retirements for clients,” Blanchett said. “You need reasonable expectations, but don’t be too conservative.”

Clients think of retirement portfolios not just as a source of income during the later stages of their lives, said Blanchett, but also as a potential legacy for their heirs.

Stagnant markets and longer lives, Yeske said, don’t match the most serious threat to retirement success: client behavior.

“We’re talking about developing reasonable models for meeting income needs in retirement and increasing probabilities for success, but what we really need to manage is client behavior,” Yeske said. “By orders of magnitude, that’s what is blowing up retirement plans.”

For Milic, that means not allowing clients to dictate that their portfolio allocations meet their desire for an exorbitant withdrawal rate of 7 percent or 8 percent, but instead trying to fit their lifestyles within the confines of a portfolio.

“We need to be firm and unwavering on this topic, but we also need to communicate it in a more sensitive manner to our clients,” Milic said. “There are clients who will jump from advisor to advisor like a grasshopper, trying to find that magic bullet that will give them their target income.”