The final option we chose was to have someone else, who is hopefully knowledgeable, invest for us. Hiring a broker is outside the scope and cost of this project, so our options were limited. What appealed to us most was to invest into a managed mutual fund, to buy stocks in a paper creation, and receive a tiny sliver of the thousands of investments contained in a large fund. Most mutual funds operate on an expense ratio, which is a certain percentage of the holdings in a fund taken every year to cover management and administration cost. This fee is the price to buy a small sliver of the whole large portfolio of stocks in a mutual fund.