Frivolous spends are leaving Brits out of pocket to the tune of £400 a year, new research has found.

Three quarters of Brits are frittering cash on purchases they don’t need on a daily basis, from takeaway coffees to nail varnishes. These unnecessary spends cost around £32.66 a month, leaving people almost £400 out of pocket every year, money which they could be saving instead of wasting.

Almost half of adults admit their extravagant spending means they often buy things they don’t need when shopping, just because the items are close to the till, with many saying they gorge on snacks they don’t want but can’t resist. Special offers on food and sale items are also among the top three impulse spends.

Kris Brewster, Head of Products for Skipton Building Society, who commissioned the research, said: “It’s surprising to see how much all of these little, everyday expenses can add up to, and how avoidable they can be. And if we’re honest, those ‘one-off’ bigger purchases are probably much more regular than we think as we sleepwalk into spending our money.

“It’s important that people stop and make the time to pause and think about their finances, considering how their spending habits big and small could have an impact on their personal savings. Without taking this time, we can all be led into to wasting money, just because bargains look too good to refuse!”

Top 20 daily frivolous purchases

Snacks you don’t really want but can’t resist the temptation
Special offers on food
Sale items you just can’t refuse
Impulse checkout sweets when queuing
Buying clothes you only wear once
Scratch cards
Buying clothes which then sit in the wardrobe, without being worn once
Lottery tickets
Lunch out instead of taking a packed lunch to work
Takeaway tea and coffee
Flowers for the house
Buying pre-chopped vegetables because you’re too lazy to cut your own
Nail varnishes when you have 20+ pots at home
Makeup
Useless kitchen gadgets
Magazines you don’t end up reading
Brand new notebooks even though you have several unused at home
Vitamin pills which you only remember to take for a couple of days
Shoes which don’t fit properly and you can’t be bothered to take back
Paying for subscription TV and then only watching a couple of channels

Tips to Save Money

Give up the daily coffee

Ditching the daily takeaway coffee habit could save a surprising amount over the course of a year. Giving up a £3-a-day coffee could save around £700 a year. Invest in a half-decent coffee machine and make coffee at home for pennies instead.

Skip the odd takeaway or meal out

Save a few pounds (cash and weight) and break out the cook books rather than takeaway menus. Cutting back on one £25 takeaway or meal out a month will save £300 over the year, as well as being good for your waistline. Plus, it’s a well-known fact that homemade food tastes better than anything you buy.

Downgrade your phone contract

With contracts for the latest flagship phones easily costing £50 or more a month in many cases, trading down to a much cheaper SIM-only deal can save a small fortune. By shopping around, you may be able to shave off £35 or more from your monthly bill. Over the course of a year, that could add up to £420.

Slash that massive pay TV package

Are you paying for satellite or cable TV channels or a package that you hardly use, like sports or movies? A top-of-the-range pay TV subscription can cost as much as £70 a month. Opting for a more basic package could save around £50 a month – or you could consider Freeview, which is free-to-air – and watch any big matches in the pub, saving as much as £600 a year .

Axe your gym membership

How many people signed up to the gym in a bloated, post-Christmas pang of guilt, only to trail off by late January? Get your running shoes on instead, hit the local pool or join the craze for bodyweight workouts (that’s doing press-ups and sit-ups for the rest of us). You could save £300 to £600 a year .

Skip the night on the town

With a night out weighing in at as much as £60, giving your wallet and liver a break once in a while can be a good idea. Stay home one extra night a month and save up to £720 a year.

Have some patience with gadgets and games

Are you the kind of person who just has to have the latest gadget or game as soon as it comes out? Maybe you time your phone upgrades around the Apple release cycle? The price of phones, consoles and other gadgets all tend to fall quite rapidly after their initial release – so having a little patience and waiting a few months can often be a shrewd move. Depending on how many you buy a year, you could save a few hundred pounds

Toshiba, a stalwart in Japan’s postwar rise as a global industrial giant, warned Tuesday that its disastrous foray into nuclear power had left substantial doubt over whether it could stay in business in its current form.

In a filing in Japan, Toshiba said losses associated with Westinghouse Electric, its troubled nuclear power arm, had created “substantial uncertainty” over its ability to continue as a going concern. It said it hoped a sale of its microchip business, its crown jewel, could alleviate that uncertainty — though the sale could mean a foreign purchase in what has long been a core Japanese industry, inviting potential political opposition.

The announcement was the latest development to arise from Toshiba’s problems with nuclear power. Westinghouse already faced substantial cost headaches when it acquired a U.S. construction company in an effort to control expenses. Instead, the deal saddled it with further liabilities. Westinghouse last month filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

A sale of Toshiba’s chip business, while offering it a lifeline, would take away its most successful business — and, more broadly, would represent a shift of a major technology away from Japan, depending on the buyer.

Nearly 40 years ago, an engineer at Toshiba invented the technology behind its chip business. That innovation would become one of the critical building blocks of the modern electronics industry.

Called flash memory, after the flash on a camera, the chips have become an essential part of smartphones and other gadgets and have proved a profitable technology for Toshiba, one of industrial Japan’s stodgiest names.

Foxconn of Taiwan, a manufacturer with big operations in mainland China, is among the bidders — all foreign — that could pay billions to buy the business. It is a remarkable turnabout for Japan, a country that controlled the majority of the market for many kinds of microchips a generation ago, and where companies have frequently banded together to rescue flailing domestic rivals rather than let them fold or be acquired by foreigners.

The Toshiba sale is still in its early stages, and the identities of the bidders have not been made public, but people with knowledge of the process say as many as a dozen companies from the United States, South Korea and Taiwan have approached Toshiba with proposals. Toshiba has not said exactly how much of the business it will sell, but even a minority stake is expected to be worth several billion dollars.

Toshiba’s microchips, a type known as NAND flash memory, are seen as a more valuable asset than TV screens. Japan — despite having pioneered liquid crystal displays — has lost most of its market share in screens to South Korea and China.

Samsung of South Korea has overtaken Toshiba in NAND, but Toshiba remains the world’s second-biggest producer, with a global share of just under 20 per cent, according to market research groups. Analysts say its technology, commonly used in smartphones and USB drives, remains at the cutting edge.

Ceding even partial control would be painful for Toshiba, which created the first NAND chips in the 1980s.

Yet Toshiba sees little choice. It wrote off more than $6 billion in February connected to Westinghouse nuclear reactor projects in the U.S., leaving its balance sheet perilously thin. Its auditors have refused to certify its latest finance statements, a sign that they believe its business remains on a shaky footing.

President Satoshi Tsunakawa apologized again for the problems Tuesday but said he did not foresee a need for any dramatic revisions in the earnings report. He called the auditor’s decision not to approve it “truly regrettable.”

Tsunakawa told reporters Toshiba’s executives have given up pay and were making other cost cuts, including selling a majority stake in the memory chip operations. Apart from its embattled nuclear segment, Toshiba’s other operations are healthy, he said.

Indian equities markets are likely to open the session with a gap-up on Thursday on the back of overnight positive sentiment from the U.S market. The SGX Nifty, which was trading at 9,183, up by 73 points or 0.80 per cent, also signalled a gap-up opening.

The two newest episodes of the DIY Musician Podcast are all about getting your music onto Spotify playlists:

Part 1 of the series is an interview with streaming promotions expert Charles Alexander, all about building your Spotify presence, pitching to prominent playlist curators, and getting the attention of Spotify’s algorithm (and in-house editorial team).

Part 2 of the series is a discussion between me and Kevin Breuner (CD Baby’s VP of Marketing) about our own playlisting experiences, some best-practices for creating and promoting playlists, and some common mistakes to avoid.

If you’re just getting into promoting your music on Spotify, these two episodes are a great place to start.

Getting your music onto a popular Spotify playlist is the modern-day equivalent of having a hit song in a local radio market. It’s an important step in reaching a larger following, and it can drive significant revenue. But you don’t just GET a song placed in a curated Spotify playlist. You need to work your way towards that goal. In this episode, digital promotion expert Charles Alexander lays out a clear strategy with achievable steps that will help you get the attention of prominent playlist curators.

Norman J Brodeur, professionally known as Norman Brodeur is an American . He began his career at a comedy club open mic, until he got a part on the tv show In Living Color in 1991. From 1996 to 2001, Brodeur was the star in his own sitcom.