The following is a guest post from Curtis Shields. He’s a pastor that majored in Economics. Besides wanting everyone to know the central blessings of Christianity: forgiveness of sins, adoption, and union with Christ, he also wants people to be better informed on how to use their resources to the glory of God.

“By far the best book on investing ever written.” Warren Buffet said these words about a book called “The Intelligent Investor,” by Benjamin Graham, his mentor. That’s a weighty statement when it’s coming from the fourth richest person in the world. In Graham’s book, he divides the world into active and passive investors. There are two ways to invest. The active way is to dig and dig and dig and dig until you’ve become smarter than the market. The second way is to not ever look at your portfolio, just keep adding money to a generally diversified portfolio. Passive investors should never be stressed. I can’t say that I’ve never been stressed about my portfolio, but I barely have. Most of those times have been when I’ve gone against Graham and tried to make moves that of course were insufficiently informed. I could be an active investor, but since I’m not employed to make myself smarter than the market, I stick to being completely passive. I basically own between six and nine index funds. I don’t even know how many. Vanguard is the greatest way to be a passive investor. I should actually do the math on how much money I pay them every year. With their fund expense ratios being so low, I suspect it’s a laughably small amount.

When I talk to people about money, I generally get one of three types of people. The first type knows a lot about money. We talk about something that one of us has seen or find something that we disagree on and make our case for our philosophy being right. Good times. The second is the person that openly knows nothing about money. I generally envy this person for their natural state not having money in sight or mind. I have no idea what that’s like. Sometimes it sounds delightful. The third type of person is the person that obviously doesn’t know much about money, feels bad about it, and thinks that it’s their adult obligation to learn about money and get their portfolio in order. The point of this article is to prove that this third type of person should not exist.

Life is hard. Many of us are fortunate to not have to do many of the toilsome tasks that consumed large portions of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ and great grandfathers’ time and energy. Industrialization, woohoo! We still have paperwork and insurance and oil changes and dirty clothes and the endless things that come at us in this cursed world, but fortunately we spend a historically small amount of our time on them. Your Creator made you to give him glory, and we do that in a few ways. We do our jobs well. We are kind to our co-workers and family and friends. We serve our spouses or roommates or whoever is around us. We serve our church and worship our Lord privately and with our brothers and sisters. We rest. We have hobbies, not to be interesting, but just because they bring us into another beautiful part of the world. We tutor poor children and teach refugees English and play checkers with old people and coach little league and act as big brothers and big sisters to people that need someone to root for them. We solve problems in the areas that we’re passionate about and work in. These are the things that should consume our time. These are adult things to do.

Investment research is something for some adults to do. Learning another part of the world is time consuming. Financial markets are hard for most people to understand. I’m one of those people that read Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace in high school. That’s weird. I don’t think that many people should be like that. I don’t know how I stumbled upon the concept of compound interest, but I know that I was young and that it clicked immediately. Don’t waste time (and that’s what it is, a total waste of time) and try to figure out how to invest. You’re probably going to do it badly, and you certainly are going to be taken away from more important things while you’re tackling this black hole.

This is my prescription. Be humble. Tell a friend that you trust a ton that knows money that you don’t know what you’re doing, and get them to help you organize your portfolio. You have to budget. Everyone has to budget, but if it’s hard for you, then get your friend that you trust to help you with setting up your budget too. Make it where money automatically transfers into you IRA in the process of setting up your portfolio. Then stick to your saving schedule, but never think about it. Track your spending, but don’t ever think about your portfolio. Use your energy on good things. Trust your friend to set up your portfolio, and become an intelligent, passive, investor.

-YMF’s notes: Curtis is a long time friend of the blog whose has been encouraging me every since the beginning and I’m very thankful for him! The book he mentions, the Intelligent Investor is a great read and was a Christmas present that I got last year. I hope you find the advice in this article helpful…be honest with yourself and don’t waste time/energey in things you’re not good at and not likely to succeed in! Even someone like myself puts 95% of my money in index funds…keep it simple!

You may also be interested in: How to win with index funds (and not lose with everything else)