When the markets tanked in 2008, I was scared. Really scared. We had clients who were nervous about whether they were going to be OK. Our firm had more than 30 people wondering whether they could keep their jobs. The bulk of my net worth outside our company was invested alongside that of our clients, and we were shedding AUM more quickly than the winner of The Biggest Loser lost weight. With the same number of clients, there much less in fee income to service them.

In March 2009, we called staff together and said that we were not going to have layoffs, but we were freezing salaries. We also said that we had a plan for further cost cutting if the markets continued to decline, but our clients needed us more than ever right now. Putting on a good face didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. No one was having very much fun. Then something strange happened; the next day, the market hit bottom. It began to turn around. Not in a way that instilled confidence, but in a way that relieved pressure. And you know the rest of the story.

It’s been almost six years since the apocalypse. Our philosophy for clients living off their portfolios was to raise cash in advance of their needs, so while their cash dwindled in ’09, we didn’t have to replace it until 2010 or 2011, meaning today those clients spending 5% of their portfolios have more than they did before the collapse. While clients did not have to take a cut in income, many chose to spend less money. That seemed normal—when you feel poor, you tend to spend less.

2008 to 2014 is a brief period. But it is still instructive. What I learned during that time is that I could have let my greatest fears turn into my greatest mistakes. It also became obvious that no matter how much we may love the data, life gets in the way. Our lives, our staff’s lives and our clients’ lives.

My question to you is, are you getting in the way of helping clients live the lives they are capable of living? By that, I mean are you so obsessed with what could go wrong that you are not paying enough attention to what is going right? The risk isn’t to have too much money, it is running out of money. But whose risk are we protecting—our clients’ or our own?

I have been around long enough to have clients who have died, who have children that have died and who have faced seemingly insurmountable life events. We have had to ask clients to leave our firm when we felt they were being irresponsible and spending more than we thought their portfolios could handle, but we also had some situations where clients died before they could fully do the things they wanted because we needed to be sure they didn’t run out of money. That felt terrible.

There needs to be some way to find an appropriate amount of spending. The realistic amount lies somewhere between a 3% glide path and a 10% path to destruction. What if you put your own fears aside—of telling clients they may have to take a pay cut in a disastrous market—and instead paid a bit more attention to what is possible.

There are no right answers to spending policy decisions. But to be clear, we are the ones writing the rules. If clients need to keep pace with inflation, drop the initial payout. If the objective is to ensure that our clients will never run out of money in any scenario, drop the initial payout. If we want to own way fewer equities, drop the initial payout. If there’s no inheritance, drop the initial payout. We can come up with a whole host of reasons and ways to ensure that our clients will never outlive their money. But what if we thought about things differently?

What if we wanted our retired clients to spend more money while they had the health to enjoy it? What if we allowed them to pick how much of their assets they could leave to children or charity? What if we didn’t pay as much attention to inflation because we were more concerned about increasing their spending today?

Every decision we make is based on a model, not a map. A model describes what could happen, but not what is. So if you change the model, you change what could happen. The question is, how can you change the model in a way that is still responsible, but allows for more money to be spent sooner?

What we have used over the last several years (even from 2008 through today) is a model that answers the question, “What is the most that I can comfortably spend, knowing that if things collapse, I will take a pay cut?”

We use the traditional Monte Carlo simulation with thousands of iterations. We pick a success rate at 93%, which means that even though we are trying to get as much money into our clients’ hands as soon as we can, most of the time they are going to have far more money than what they had intended. It excludes certain assets—real estate, for example. We take a three-year portfolio average, which means that during a bull market the portfolio value we use is muted; during a bear market, it is enhanced. We don’t adjust for inflation; we increase cash flow based on portfolio returns. We drive down fixed expenses so our retirees can afford to cut their “pay” if need be. And we take an advance on certain things that we have the choice of delaying—pension income or Social Security. We set aside cash based on market valuations. All of these things raise the chances of success to a level in which our clients can spend more of their portfolios than traditional measures would allow. A different question results in a different answer.

The clients’ spending is then determined by their asset allocation, portfolio amount and the degree of their original portfolio they wish to preserve. Every five years we start over, because the client is five years older and his or her portfolio has changed. We don’t allow a spending drop of more than 5% (and that is frozen for three years) unless a client younger than 85 is spending more than 10% of his or her portfolio—in which case another drop would occur. But the result of this is that clients can spend more earlier. This is not the right approach—it is an approach we believe in and are comfortable with. Give up on the right approach—there isn’t one.

When markets are volatile, behavior changes—our behavior and our clients’ behavior. Situations are impermanent; they are always moving. Using a strategy that locks things up through a flat payout rate may allow us to avoid the pay cut discussion, but it doesn’t reflect what happens in complex adaptive systems. We change, clients change, markets change, wants and desires change.

There are many ways to handle the spending policy discussion. What’s most important to understand is that how you handle it may be based more on your own fears than those of your client.

Ross Levin, CFP, is founding principal and president of Accredited Investors Inc. in Edina, Minn. Long an industry leader, he has served as chairman of the International Association for Financial Planning.