Money cheat. Yay or Nay?

I usually cheat money by planting money tree.

I only use it if I want to move my sims in a bigger lot that they can't afford.

Other!

I only use Motherlode on a test sim in my vanilla build save.

For my actual story play I often start with a homeless or extremely poor sim and empty their wallet completely. Zero simoleons.
I use the free real estate cheat so the extremely poor dude can at least move into the awful shack I built for him.
I don't do rags to riches challenges either, so my homeless guy just wanders the world and I try and make sure he survives and learns a thing or two on the way.
Sometimes I do the total opposite and make my sim stinking rich. I use a mod for that. I'm talking mansions, maids and butlers.

Then there's the "ordinary" guy. He starts off with 20000 simoleons and gets a "regular" job, finds a wife and may or may not have kids.
In this game the real challenge for me is not the money, but having little sim kids...

Nope, don't need to, it's so easy to earn money

I'm more on the nay side, but playing a lot of sims there are situtations where families get money cheated in or away.

I used to go ether motherlode or money(insert amount here), but they became pretty redundant as making money is much easier in 4 than in the prior sims games.

I picked no because I don't use cheats to give more money to the main families in my game, the families I actually play.
I do occasionally use the money cheat to reduce my sims household funds to pretend they have to pay for clothing or transport. But I assume this pollis about adding money, not subtracting it.

I made a quick and easy python script that gives me the max amount of cash. I did it because Laitha came from a wealthy family and she inherited the wealth, so I needed to make her rich right off the bat. That 9,999,999 simoleons is shared among the entire family.

There's certain careers though where the money just rolls in. Samantha is the master artist of the family and she makes stupid amounts of money on her own.

Sure, let them have riches! If lacking funds interferes with how I want to play or what I want to do, like send them on an adventure to Selvadorada, I'll cheat some money. If I want to play a wealthy household from the getgo, I'll cheat. I also play rotationally and colonize my game so I don't want every household to be the same grind, I like variety. Some are rich, some are poor, and some just don't need income as a factor.

The cheats have been something I have always appreciated in Sims games. At bare minimum, sometimes you do not want to live in one of the original starter houses or want immediate access to some items. Certainly if they were taken away, I would be upset.

On the other hand, I agree that 4 has never been balanced particularly well, especially financially, and it never seemed like a priority. In that regard, I prefer cheats more because it seems like more of circumventing nuisances than a fun gameplay loop. However, 4 could use a lot more long term goals besides financial well being.