When it comes to making decisions about your money, you can’t help but be guided by certain things: what you have read or heard; experiences from early in your childhood; beliefs taught to you by your parents and loved ones as you grew up, etcetera. In my case, several personal tragedies early in my life helped shape who I am today and how I counsel clients to manage their money.

After losing my father at a young age, suffering severe financial difficulties and nearly landing in jail when my family couldn’t afford to pay an attorney to prove my innocence after a car accident, I quickly realized that money buys you choices, and I made it my personal mission to learn everything there is to know about money and investing.

Whether you are 25, 55, or 75 years old, retirement (or financial independence) should be something you are thinking about and planning for. For employees in the private and even the public sector, pensions and entitlement programs are becoming more and more uncommon and unreliable. But self-employed entrepreneurs, too, must consider how to invest their hard-earned money over the long haul.

In my 20-plus years as a financial advisor, I began to realize a problem with the traditional financial planning models: They leave far too much up to chance.

Unfortunately, a lot of retirees found this to be true when, after the market collapse of 2008, they were forced to go back to work because their investment portfolios dropped by 50 percent or more.

If there is a bright side to this, it is that none of my clients who had taken my advice had to change their lifestyles or go back to work because of the financial crisis. I had been anticipating just such an event and had been preparing my clients for it. However, seeing the devastation that time caused for so many others, I decided to write a book addressing the problem of uncertainty that many retirees face due to what I call “conventional wisdom.”

The problem with “conventional wisdom” is that it is based on historical data and outdated methods that assume the stock market will have a continual upward bias. My method, in a nutshell, involves setting up safe, predictable, or guaranteed sources of income designed to produce the cash flow needed to support each retiree’s lifestyle.

So, whether or not you are planning for retirement right now, hopefully you are working towards the goal of financial independence. As you think about financial independence, I challenge you to work towards an income goal rather than a net-worth goal since it’s the amount of income from your investments that will ultimately determine the lifestyle you will be able to support. Just as the traditional retirement planning model is broken, so too is the accumulation model. While a stock market drop may not be nearly as devastating to an accumulator as it would be to a retiree, no one likes to see their hard-earned savings vanish into thin air.

Unfortunately, due to the current interest-rate environment, keeping money in cash and CDs is essentially a futile enterprise. Bond yields have also fallen so low that many investors have been forced to take greater risk than they typically would in order to get a decent return.