Your investments work for you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. What are they doing? Does that work align with your mission and values?

Hard Work

Investing is hard. Like, really hard.

It’s easy, of course, to buy a stock. Especially today. It has never been easier. Many online brokerages don’t even charge commissions anymore. It’s so easy.

But really investing to earn a return over time that will help you achieve financial goals, like being able to retire someday. That is seriously hard work.

One way to make it easier is to hire other people to do it. There are easy ways to do this, like buying mutual funds and ETFs. An ETF is an exchange-traded fund that trades like a stock but represents ownership in a portfolio of stocks, similar to a mutual fund.

Choosing funds is almost as tricky as selecting stocks. Broad funds like those that track the S&P 500 index or the Nasdaq 100 invest in many individual stocks. Funds are not required to disclose every stock they own—only the top ten la...more