Being a single woman with most of my family dead, and an introvert with few friends other than Frank to lean on, I felt absolutely compelled to work towards a financially bulletproof retirement. After a financially disastrous 1998 divorce that left me with a negative net worth, no house, less than $1000, no retirement savings or investments, and creditors hounding me, at age 50, I was scared to death about retirement. So my first step was ramping up the LBYM severely, and then working hard on retirement planning. I strongly felt, and feel, that my financial future is my own responsibility and I'd better not mess it up.
So anyway, I used ALL of the approaches you mention, and made sure my retirement would work no matter which I used. I feel like FIRECalc is the best calculator around, and everyone should at least be given the go-ahead by FIRECalc. That said, I'm not trusting any one calculator. I used every calculator I could find, used the 25x factor, modeled my income and outgo with inflation, studied the seminal papers on relevant topics at JFP and elsewhere, and blah blah blah.
Using all of these I was OK to retire and completely set by my late 50's, but then had to work for 2-3 more years beyond that to age 61.5 in order to qualify for retiree health insurance and mini-pension. I continued to save at the same rate during those 2-3 years, and meanwhile came into some good fortune, and also got some divorced spousal SS at age 66 that I wasn't expecting. So, to make a long story short, my ultra-conservative financial plan plus unexpected good fortune that was not part of my planning, resulted in a retirement that is WAY over-funded.
That's OK with me. Being a worry wart, I'd rather be over-funded than worried about money all the time.
My spending record is overly conservative too and I know that I need to ramp up my "Blow that Dough" efforts. How was I to know that the market would boom like this?
I was planning for the opposite plus massive inflation. I haven't had much good luck in my life, so although I never expected it, I'll take it.
I sold my (paid off) home and bought my (paid off) Dream Home that I have always wanted, three years ago. So my spending in retirement has been:
2010: 2.61%
2011: 1.98%
2012: 2.12%
2013: 2.40%
2014: 1.70% (started getting divorced spousal SS)
2015: 1.72% + 6.92% for Dream Home purchase and move
2016: 1.75%
2017: 1.58%
2018: 0.28% (projected - - went on my own SS which is higher than divorced spousal)
My very conservative (45:55 AA) investment portfolio today is 134% of what it was on 11/9/2009, the day I retired. Part of the reason the percentages above are so low, is that even though I spend more every year I am not catching up with market increases. Guess I hit the "sweet spot". That's OK by me.
I plan to self fund LTC, so some of it may be used for that some day.