Ask Paul: October 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And Happy Call of Duty day if you're celebrating. Let's kick of the last weekend of October with some terrific reader questions.
My wife is also my accountant
dremy1011 asks:

In what might be the most random question this week, I've started to re-evaluate how I handle my household budget. I'm wondering how your budget is maintained (special software, Excel spreadsheet)? I've been using a software application but the yearly fee has recently increased, I'm also always curious how others manage this. If it's a spreadsheet, how do you have this setup and how do you monitor it on a daily/monthly basis?

I am embarrassingly disconnected from this on a daily or weekly basis because my wife handles our finances. She's better at it, but like anything related to this small business we now have, it would be horribly distracting and problematic for me to spend time on it. But we do of course discuss these things regularly and as things come up. And while we don't have a formal monthly meeting per se, she would like that, and we do less formally put aside time every few months to go over things.

So I asked her to make sure I wasn't missing anything. We had been using Mint for a long time but its parent company, Intuit, shut the service down and recommended that customers switch over to something called Credit Karma, which was lackluster and not really the same thing. My wife hated it, so she researched other services and experimented with a few.

She eventually settled on Quicken Simplifi, which I see is also recommended by The Wirecutter (though that was three years ago, and I don't see anything more recent; this year-old NYT article is the closest I could find). Concurrent to this, we started using QuickBooks for the business because George's accountant uses/used it, but our company isn't really complicated enough to warrant this. (And this is likely beside the point.)

Anyway, Simplifi seems to work well. IIt does all the expected things where you enter all your account information, and it provides net worth, monthly income, and expenses data, and you can set budgets for different categories and so on.
Skimming the Surface
helix2301 asks:

Where do you land on Surface not Arm? Surface Laptop Studio has not been refreshed in a while they don't make headphones or earbuds anymore. I was all in on the Surface brand and now it seems to be not fading away I know you say never trust a consumer product to Microsoft but Surface was so good and in Microsoft wheel house.

Surface is complicated.

On the one hand, I always felt very strong--and still do--that Microsoft competing head to head with its biggest partners, companies that contribute billions of dollars of revenues every quarter was and still is a big mistake. And Microsoft expanded Surface beyond all reason over the years, and haphazardly, getting into non-Premium models that I feel tarnished the brand, too many models, a host of peripherals, and most stupidly...