I was sitting at my desk reviewing my personal finances (which is a nightly ritual for me) and I was thinking about how I used to use both Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken software. These days I don’t use anything besides some spreadsheets that I created and, frankly, they work great! But as I was going over my finances I started to think about the old Mint.com account that I opened up about a year ago before shutting it down.

Some months ago I remembered hearing that Mint.com was purchased by Intuit, which I thought was a real shame since Mint.com had a great user interface and was very user-friendly. Intuit doesn’t have the best record on either of those issues. Anyway, as I was thinking about this stuff I pulled up the New York Times website and wouldn’t you know that there was an interview with the creator of Mint.com (who is now a Vice President at Intuit) right there on the front page? It was a good interview, too! For example, I found out things like this…

Q. Are there parts of corporate culture that you find strange?

A. The corporate campus seems so quiet. A start-up is overflowing with energy. Here it’s a little more subdued. They’ve got these high, very depressing cubicles.

If I wanted a new computer or had some I.T. issue at Mint, I just walked to the tech ops team and they would get me set up in a couple of minutes. At Intuit, being a big company, you call the help desk, and the help desk has been outsourced to some foreign country — I can’t place the accent. They really have no idea of where you are or what your needs are. It’s the standard phone service when you get sent to a foreign country, but this is an internal help desk. It’s a real pain. I expressed this to one of my Quicken colleagues and he said, “Yeah, we just never call the help desk. Don’t bother, here’s who you need to call to skirt around the system…” I thought, that’s sort of dumb in a bureaucratic way.

But at the same time, a big company has processes with much more rigor than what we ever had in a start-up. They have great specialization when it comes to retail, packaging, search engine marketing or affiliate programs. And the financial rigor of a big company is phenomenal in terms of projections, making sure everything is on track on a weekly basis, or reporting your numbers — they’re very, very good at that sort of thing.

I found that interesting, but I also like reading about corporate culture. The interview – linked above – is a short read and one that I think you’ll enjoy if you’re interested in the internet and technology or just how entrepreneurs are integrated into established organizations.

Sure, no individual needs to use both of these programs at the same time. However, as I own my own business, I used Quicken for the business and Money for my personal finance needs and it worked great for years. Then, earlier this year Quicken essentially stopped supporting my version of the software and told me that I had to update (i.e. purchase an upgrade) in order to keep using their program. Not happening.

Instead, I looked into Money and realized that I could easily manage my business accounts under a separate listing and thus moved everything over to that program and uninstalled Quicken. It was somewhat sad to see the program go, but it was the best financial decision. So if you’re keeping score – Quicken is now gone from my system.

Oh, and bear in mind that this is all going on during the same time period where I’ve essentially decided that I want to strip my computer of all non-essential software and remove myself from superfluous websites. Frankly, since I started this stripping down process, my computer runs smoother and I have an incredible amount of room to store pictures, music, and documents. It’s great! But I digress…

During the last few years I’ve also created a series of spreadsheets that monitors and tracks my every expense down to the penny. Some people would consider that level of personal financial management to be a bit overboard, but at 28 years old (and saddled with $98,000 in student loan debt), I think it is absolutely critical to know where my money is and what it is doing. Also, my use of a certain spreadsheet to plan for upcoming expenses has allowed me to have $0 in credit card/consumer debt while increasing the total dollar amount of other, “good” expenses like donations and money put into savings accounts and the stock market. Money provided tremendous assistance in getting me to the point where I could create my own financial spreadsheets and have them actually mean something. However, last week I removed Microsoft Money Plus from my system.

As I started this post with – this one should have hurt, but it didn’t…at all. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft stopped supporting their Money series to the level that they support, say, and Office suite. I guess that the increasing sales of Office and other Microsoft products necessitated a shift in focus away from personal finance. Plus, with great free personal finance websites popping up (like Mint.com, which was actually purchased by Quicken), I imagine that the powers that be at Microsoft didn’t think that there was a lot of future profit potential in the Money line.

So, the latest software to get removed from my system is Microsoft Money Plus. I wonder which program will be next…

What happened to AIM? Could it be that the rise of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (with their built-in messaging systems) have rendered AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo! Messenger useless? Maybe the fact that text/picture messages and Blackberries are ubiquitous in today’s society also hinders AIM’s growth. Seems logical.

Granted, I understand that I first started using AIM over ten years ago (probably closer to 15 years ago) when I was a young teenager. Since I’m in my late 20’s these days, I guess that most of the people that I talked to on AIM are either now on my text message list or are a Facebook friend. It would appear that I don’t need AIM any more, actually, since I rarely sign on anyway.

And as I’ve written on JerseySmarts.com a few times already, I’ve been very interested in paring down the software that sits dormant on my laptop. In the last month I’ve removed a bunch of this unneeded software that has been taking up precious disk space. A week or two ago I uninstalled Google Chrome because I rarely used it (plus I’ve already become so accustomed to Mozilla Firefox) and earlier today I uninstalled Yahoo! Messenger since I haven’t used it in over a year. When looking around my computer, I found the old “AOL Instant Messenger” program which was replaced with AOL’s current AIM program…so I removed the old program since I hadn’t used it since the spring of 2006. Also, I purchased a discounted copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, which prompted me to uninstall OpenOffice.org from Sun Microsystems. Could AIM be next on the list of programs to be deleted? I’m not sure.

I think that I’d like to keep at least one of each of the major programs (one instant messenger program, one major non-Microsoft browser, one major office productivity suite, etc), so AIM may stay around on that fact alone. But the truth remains that even if the program does stay on my computer it’ll probably be a rarely used piece of software.

Isn’t it amazing how the internet and electronic communication have changed?

TheWebBlocker.com is a website created to market and sell internet privacy software named (as you might imagine) The Web Blocker. This software allows parents and guardians to block their young internet surfers from going to certain websites – all with the click of a single button!

I know the owner of TheWebBlocker.com from my college days and I know that this is a quality product. For those of you who have young ones in the home or know of family or friends who have young ones in the home, you may want to consider purchasing this very affordably priced software. How affordably priced is the program? There is a one-time charge of $9.95 and no other fees after that – ever.

Can you imagine going to the local electronics store and picking up a truly quality piece of internet management software for less than $10? I don’t think so.

In any event, I recommend checking out TheWebBlocker.com even if you’re only heading over to see the website and read about the product. And for those of you who might be able to employ a simple, easy-to-use website blocking program, I think that you’ll find The Web Blocker is the right software for you!