anyone know of an old post or somewhere that shows how to work the money on these teams?

It does take some getting used to. How I work the team finances is to go to team homepage. This shows you the following:
Total Cap
Dead Cap
Room Under Cap
Money needed for draft picks: (If season is before draft). As well as:
Next year's cap and dead cap.

For the current season, you must make sure you have enough cap space for your draft picks. You can release players to get to that total.

When renewing contracts, I will start with the renegotiation wizard to get an idea of how much I will need and what players I will be resigning.

I then will click "contract" on each players card I want to renew. On that screen, you will see near the top "remaining cap room". You can adjust your contracts as needed to stay under that total.

It took a couple weeks for me to get the idea, but I find this is the easiest way for me.

Hope this helps.

Just remember when cutting or trading, all current and future bonus gets accelerated to dead cap next year. Salary will be prorated that year and rest isn't guaranteed.

That said, if you want to resign your own talent, best bet is to see what the minimum they will sign for and make the bonus up to 75% and reduce salary+bonus until you get the 75% bonus to that amount. There are some threads on this. Send a message if you have questions.

https://cust9.myfootballnow.com/community/thread/1/2525?page=1#18235