Too busy to invest? Here’s how I do it in under 30 minutes a month

High-interest savings accounts are currently offering interest between 5 per cent and 6 per cent. Last year, my investments grew more than triple what any savings account would have.

What is perhaps more interesting, though, is how little work was involved.

Making money in your sleep isn’t just a line peddled by self-help gurus.Credit: Simon Letch

Nowadays, my involvement is minimal. I log into my account, review my portfolio and invest based on my investment plan. There’s also some documentation around tax time. That’s about it. It usually takes less than half an hour a month.

I’m not glued to the finance news. I don’t obsess over market movements. I have a minimal maintenance, rinse-and-repeat strategy I can use forever to grow my wealth faster than any savings account while I’m busy enjoying my life.

This is what the money gurus keep talking about – making money in your sleep, having your money work harder for you than you do for it, and so on.

It’s an attractive idea. Yet despite its appeal, so many people still procrastinate on investing for years, if not decades. Why?

There are many reasons – fear of risk, not knowing where to start, feeling intimidated by the complexity, overwhelmed by the volume of conflicting opinions. However, the reason I want to address today is a common one: the sense that it’s too time-consuming.

Is investing really time-consuming?

Let’s start with why this misconception exists. Firstly, investing is a diverse space. There isn’t only one way to invest. It’s a bit like exercise.

It would be inaccurate to say exercise is time-consuming because there are many ways to exercise. You don’t have to spend an hour a day in the gym. Similarly, different investment strategies require varying levels of commitment.

There are strategies that are focused on short-term profits. This means you’re buying with a view to sell within a short period for a profit. The thing you’re most interested in is not the underlying value of the asset, but the upfront cost compared to what you think you can sell it for. Trading and flipping houses are both short-term strategies focused on maximising profit from the sale.

Short-term strategies tend to require more ongoing effort. It is a continual process of buying and selling. You typically can’t create large amounts of wealth off a single trade, so you have to stay in the game. No matter how good you get, you still have to put in the time to find and sell “good deals”. So, to do well, it can become a part-time job.

This is also the style of “investing” that gets the spotlight – it’s what you see in movies and TV shows because that’s where the drama is. You see traders panicking about or constantly monitoring market movements. You see news headlines about recessions and market crashes.

The goal is to allow your investments to free up your time so you can live more and worry less.

This makes investing seem like a complicated and demanding adrenaline sport, full of dramatic highs and lows. But this isn’t the only way to invest.

The minimal-maintenance approach to investing

The other option is buying investments with a view to holding them long-term, not selling them for a profit in the short term. In other words, the “buy-and-hold” strategy.

Your goal is to hold them for years, or even decades, to allow the assets to continue generating returns (either in the way of income or appreciation) over time.

In this approach, most of the work is upfront. Here’s a short checklist of some of the upfront work involved in this long-term investment approach:

• Determine which investment options are optimal for your goals
• Design an asset allocation that suits your goals and circumstances
• Research and select individual investments to add to your portfolio
• Research and select the platforms to use to execute investments
• Optimise tax across your investment and superannuation portfolios
• Do the mental/emotional work to develop an investor’s mindset

Once you’ve set up your portfolio with investments aligned with your long-term goals, the maintenance can be fairly minimal. You can tune out the daily noise about market movements because your strategy is designed to ride out the short-term ups and downs.

You can get on with other aspects of your life without monitoring your portfolio every day, week or even month.

Having helped countless people start and grow their investments, this is the approach I have found to yield the best results for most people because it doesn’t just deliver more money – it gives you more freedom.

Freedom from stressing about market movements. Freedom from constantly monitoring your portfolio. Freedom to focus on other personal and professional goals.

The goal isn’t to sacrifice all your spare time to grow your investments. The goal is to allow your investments to free up your time so you can live more and worry less.

Paridhi Jain is founder of SkilledSmart, which helps adults learn to manage, save and invest money through financial education courses and classes.

• Advice given in this article is general in nature and not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.

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