My household food costs are about 20% more than what the calculator shows (and that's a very minimal budget)

Behold, "averages" are not perfect.

Are you following the USDA thrifty food plan like the methodology assumes?

I don't perfectly weigh our groceries every week to hit the exact counts they recommend, no.

But we stick to the essentials, utilize different stores for the lowest prices we can get, and don't purchase nonsense.

Would you agree that large uncertainties can bring into question the validity of a model?

Ie “averages” with large variances are not often very informative

I agree that the very term "averages" implies "an average".

	▲	bumby 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s the second time you’ve had a snarky reply so I can’t tell if you’re having a good faith conversation. The average wealth between me and Elon is several hundred billion dollars. That gives you very little information about me. Which is why people can hang too much inference on a simple average. Like Nate Silver said in The Signal and The Noise, the real discussion for the data literate is about uncertainty in models, not just drawing conclusions from “averages”