Way back in 1995, I remember when I helped a young pest control business get their first computer. We set up their books with a new software from Quicken. Over the years, Quicken has been the only real money management software for personal of business use.
Since then there has been several of money management programs to come on the market and many of them leave. Then in 2005, Aaron Patzer said there could be something better. So in 2008 Mint.com came out of beta.
When I was growing up my dad would cash his pay check, bring it home and put divide it up by putting it in envelopes. Each envelope was to represent a bill that needed to be paid. This was one generation from putting money in a set of jars, with each jar committed to a bill.
On the other extreme I have talked to some people of the younger generations who keep a rough running total in their head. For some reason the vast majority of these people are overdrawn on their checking, for reasons they cannot understand.
In my junior and senior year of high school we had a special class on budgeting. It included a handwritten a ledger. We had to keep a running total of outgoing and incoming money. Today, I use a little easier method of tracking our family finances; it is called Quicken.
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