In the new version we turned finances on, as well as personalities. There are too many aspects of the game affected by money, signings, personality, etc. to allow people to turn it off at this point.
As a stop gap, you can always set the Salary cap extremely high and the player salary levels low to avoid the pitfalls of having to stay under a salary cap.
Yea, sorry that it won't work out for you. The coaching module is pretty much what is driving this. Hard to have a staff and hire coaches if we don't have budgets and salaries.