Technology has certainly made our lives a whole lot easier in the last couple of days. To imagine that there used to be a time where we had to read the newspaper to check the weather, or drive-by the movie theater to see when shows were playing. There are now specialized tools to simplify just about every part of our lives, including monthly budgeting.

There are two major professional personal finance packages, which are Microsoft Money and Quicken. They both have very similar functionality, with a little bit different interfaces. They both track expenditures, watch your investments, help you set goals, and the like.

Some people successfully use these programs to manage their financial lives, but for 95% of individuals, these software packages are simply over kill. It’s like trying to get rid of dandelions by uprooting the entire lawn. Quick and Microsoft Money have become so enriched with widgets and un-needed functionality that they’re no longer intuitive to operate for the average user. The amount of time that one has to invest just to learn the product well makes it not worth while when a simple spreadsheet would suffice.

If one spent a decent amount of time investigating either of these applications and all of their intricate tools and utilities, one could make very good use of it. However unless you need some of the advanced functionalities such as interfacing with your bank electronically, in most cases it’s just easier for someone to make a simple spreadsheet, or have someone who’s a bit more tech savvy make one for you. If you finances are very simple and you don’t know a lot about computers, there’s no reason you can’t make up your monthly budget on a yellow pad.

These programs aren’t free either. You’ll have to fork over $29.99 for this years edition of Microsoft Money, or $39.99 for a copy of Quicken Personal Finance Deluxe. Of course they come out with a new version each year, so it’s not a simple one-time fee either.

I decided to give both of these programs the benefit of the doubt, tried to use them to do a monthly budget, but all I’ve found were interfaces that are unintuitive, wasted time without really any results, random application crashes, and more confusion. When you consider that most people can do everything they need without one of these fancy applications, the cost of purchasing these applications, as well as the learning curve to make good use of these software applications, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.