4 Influencers Who Want You to Spend Less: Brennan Coker

This is the third installment of a four-part series in which NerdWallet Canada profiles social media influencers who use their clout to help people spend less.

Unlike some of the other influencers profiled in this series, Florida-based Brennan Coker (IG: @brennankai; Tiktok: @brennan.kai) avoided spending herself into a financial black hole while in her 20s.

“I lived in Miami for school for eight years, and it’s very much a culture of hustling and loudly displaying excessive signs of wealth,” she says. “That did not appeal to me at all, and I wanted very much to differentiate myself from that.”

Maintaining a cost-conscious lifestyle in South Florida — or anywhere circa now — takes commitment. Coker’s working-class, bohemian background helped her establish realistic financial expectations, but it’s been her willingness to live simply that has her debt-free on the doorstep of thirty.

“When I was in college, I never had money. I was constantly scrounging and always trying to work multiple jobs to figure it out,” she says. “It very much was a different path to take, and I feel now that it was a good one.”

Waste not, want not

A sustainability influencer at heart, Coker’s primary focus for the past two years has been reducing food waste as a means of limiting pollution and saving people money.

“I had this realization that, even if you’re not a sustainability-minded person, pretty much everyone can get behind reducing food waste for a wide variety of reasons,” she says. “It’s very hard to find people that are like, ‘No, I love wasting food.’”

Coker estimates that she’s cut her grocery expenses by at least a third, in part by making relatively simple adjustments: meal prepping, buying nutritious “shelf-stable” products like canned beans, and properly storing perishable foods.

Another step toward food savings, Coker says, is eating simpler and cooking for yourself. It’s a view that puts her at odds with most online food content — adventurous recipes made up of niche ingredients, or meals at trendy restaurants photographed for maximum succulence.

“I want to normalize cooking simple meals at home for the average family,” she says. “Encouraging people to make changes at the household level is a huge, huge thing that we can do to help remove that financial burden off of families.”

Follow the thread

Coker is also a proponent of sustainable fashion practices. Much of her content is aimed at reducing the amount of fast fashion that winds up scattered across the planet’s landfills and shorelines.

Coker concedes that sustainable fashion brands can be too expensive for the budget-conscious. That’s why she focuses on buying second hand, either at thrift stores or through online marketplaces like Poshmark, Mercari and Depop.

Another tactic she uses is organizing clothing-swap get-togethers with friends, which are both fun and a means of participating in “circular fashion,” a movement focused on reducing waste by reusing, donating or repairing clothing items.

“That’s a great way to keep things in a circularity system where things go to a new home, they’re not being diverted to landfill and it’s free.”

Brennan Coker’s tips for reducing food waste:

Store greens properly. Keep leafy greens in a container with a damp paper towel.
Make double, freeze half. Cooking in bulk reduces waste and saves money on future meals.
Think long-term. Look into canning, freeze drying and dehydrating to give nutritious foods a longer shelf life.

Finfluencing: A one-way street?

Financial influencers hare adept at helping people spend money. Half of the people surveyed for Izea Insights’ 2024 Trust In Influencer Marketing Canada report say they purchased a product after seeing it being used by an influencer.

But are influencers as effective at teaching someone not to do something, or to do something challenging, like getting their spending under control?

Errol Osecki, an accounting professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, is currently studying how financial influencers impact their followers’ emotions and behaviours.

“We know that they can influence someone to do something, but to not do something, it’s hard to say,” Osecki says, adding that personal change is often a matter of internal desire rather than external prompting.

“But certainly, external content can play a role in influencing how that change takes place,” he says.

For consumers ready to rein in their spending, Osecki suggests a simple starting point: making a budget.

“I know that can be intimidating and imposing for a lot of people, but what budgeting does is it forces mindfulness of spending. And there are studies that show that if you increase your mindfulness about this, you’re going to see increased savings outcomes,” he says.

“Just grab yourself a little pocket notebook and a pen and start writing down everything you spend each and every day. I guarantee that you will start saving money.”

Photo by Meredith Wallace.