My car was T-boned in downtown Minneapolis after a Twins game by a distracted driver who ran through a long red light. While no one was hurt, my car had thousands of dollars of damage and his car was totaled.

The police came, handled the situation expertly, gave him a ticket since he accepted full responsibility for his actions, and cleared the scene. My tow truck was dispatched to the wrong address, but it eventually came and towed my no-longer-drivable car to the dealership as my wife picked me up downtown.

The distracted driver was exceptionally nice, even though I was angry about being hit. Because of how he handled himself, it took me only moments to calm down and move to solving the issues that were in front of us — such as how to get the police to come and assess responsibility (important because his negligence would excuse me from paying my deductible) and how to get my car towed. The fact that he owned his role in the crash made me want to work with him rather than against him.

This was in sharp contrast to the claims adjuster from his insurance company. She viewed her role as trying to not pay 100 percent of the claim, despite her client's acknowledgment and the police concurrence. Her position brought out my lower animal self and made me want to punish her. I knew that I wasn't responsible, so I started to think about different ways that I could increase the claim — car rental, physical therapy, etc.

Once I stepped back, I realized that I should not have her behavior affect my behavior, and let my company's claims person deal with the issue in his professional way, leading to the appropriate outcome.

There were many lessons from this experience (besides the obvious problems with distracted driving) and I want to share with you how they affect your financial planning.

You rarely make good decisions when you are angry, so don't hold yourself to them. The damage from me trying to punish their claims adjuster would have been psychological for me. I would have known that I was not doing the right thing and I would have had to figure out a way to justify it to myself.

When we feel wronged, we often develop a theory for our less-than-stellar follow-up actions. I see upset clients try to "punish" their kids who are seemingly unappreciative or underperforming by withholding money. This is fine if there was an agreement beforehand — for example, we will pay for school as long as you are making progress toward a degree — but if expectations were never expressed the frustration should be toward themselves for not articulating them.

Michael Lewis wrote in "The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds," "When people become attached to a theory, they fit evidence to the theory rather than the theory to the evidence."

The theory to which we become attached may be that our children are not doing their part, when an alternative theory could be we are not engaging our children in appropriate discussions around money. It is important that when you realize that you may have handled something wrong to retrench, acknowledge your mistake, and come to a better solution.

Remember the sample size when you are using probabilities. I had an interaction with one claims adjuster from this company and leapt to the conclusion that it is a horrible insurance company. My sample size was one so that was an unreasonable conclusion.

In financial planning, we often hear statements about average returns, average costs, average home prices. But you are one person. Averages require laws of large numbers and your situation is yours alone. What is important is for you to be comfortable with strategies that are being used for you and that if your results fall outside an expected range, that you can still live with them. Spending is personal and based on values, not what the average is. Averages may give you perspective, but only if you understand them. If the average temperature in Minnesota is 50 degrees, it doesn't mean a windbreaker is suitable year round.

We often only see one alternative outcome when there are many. If I had left the game a little earlier or a little later, then I wouldn't have been in that crash. Actually, there are an unlimited number of possibilities that could have prevented the crash: if I hadn't gone to the game at all, or if I took the light rail, or took a different route home, etc.

We do this all the time in planning. We think the market is too high, so we have to move to cash, but there are unlimited things we can do in between. There are rarely binary choices. We could reduce our stock exposure, we could target some of our savings to debt reduction, we could move assets into areas that may seem less expensive. Taking some action, even if it is relatively small, may help you from taking big actions that tend to prove costly over the long run.

It's no accident that those who take the time to think about how complex situations are make better decisions.

Ross Levin is the chief executive and founder of Accredited Investors Wealth Management in Edina