Elias

I just found these (ancient) philosophers' takes on money and wanted to quickly share them. I hope you enjoy reading them as a complement to Anton Kreil's radically honest personal perspective.

Aristotle

In Aristotelian philosophy, virtue is the key requirement for a life well lived. But while his stoic contemporaries thought virtue alone would assure a good life, Aristotle knew that a few other things would be needed. Among them are friendship, good luck, and money.
While he saw money as merely a tool to promote other goals, he is open about the fact that the good life requires that you have a fair amount of it. One of the items on his list of virtues needed to live a full life is magnificence, which involves the donation of large sums to charity.

Epicurus

Epicurus was a philosopher with some bold ideas on how to make people happy. He lived in the countryside in a large house with a dozen other people where they all lived communally. He argued that the path to happiness was moderation, strong friendships, and philosophy.
Rather than accumulating wealth, one should try and live a simple life and find joy in things like friends, the pleasures of work, and philosophy. The moderate life, however, didn’t require much money at all.

Nietzsche

 Nietzsche argued that the morality of the gospels was a slave morality which was based on a sort of sour grapes approach to things. Since the authors of the gospels didn’t have money or power they declared those things to be evil and the poverty and weakness they had to be good. Nietzsche sees this reactionary morality to be unbecoming of great people.
This doesn’t mean that he thought hoarding cash was good, but he does warn us to be wary of the poor man who derides money as evil and useless to our happiness.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard strikes out against how people are increasingly dispassionate, conforming, and detached. He blames, among other things, money for causing some of this. As the abstraction of real value, it tends to make us desire of it rather than the things it can buy or represents.
Kierkegaard implores us to dive headfirst into life and live it fully and desiring too much money is a symptom of not doing so.

Karl Marx

Marx reminds us that money, for all the bad things philosophers often say about it, is extremely useful. It drives history, grants the ability to accomplish great things, and often consumes too much of our time. His philosophy of communism isn’t so much against wealth as it is an attempt to tame it and make it the servant of humanity rather than the problem it frequently can be. The results have been mixed at best.

The Buddha

His life story and later dedication to intellectual pleasures speak against a life of chasing money as the path to Nirvana. However, extreme poverty is no solution either. While many Buddhist monks are supposed to avoid even touching money, the rest of us are encouraged to have the “right livelihood” and earn it virtuously. This also includes not having more than we need.
We are warned that there is too much of a good thing and that we should not suppose that more money is the solution to suffering. Having nothing isn’t too much fun either though.