You out here. You invested. And you’re waiting for the Benjamins to start rolling in.

Yet when you open your app three days (or even 3 months) later, the number may not be much more than what you put in (or even smaller), and you may wonder if this whole investing thing is a scam.

As you should. Keep your standards high my queens, kings, and assorted royal figures.

When you set aside money for investing, the whole pitch is that your money is now working just as hard as you do. So really friggin hard.

But initially, it may look like your money is as useless as your coworker. You know the one...

Early on in investing, your money probably won't grow a ton. And by early, I mean the first year, if not the first few years.

The gains that make investing worth it show up in decades.

And in that time frame if you are constantly checking how your investments are performing, buying and selling all the time, and stop investing consistently because it doesn't seem to be working, you can cost yourself a lot of money.

So this week, let me make the case for doing nothing at all.

"Set it and forget it" sounds oddly similar to "hit it and quit it," but the former is far more conducive to your financial and relational wellbeing.

There are a few reasons why:

The instinct is obvious. Buy when it is low, sell when it is high, retire at 30 on a boat drinking your martinis like the baddie that you are.

The problem is that you have to be right twice. You have to correctly call the bottom, and then correctly call the top.

And the cost of being wrong is brutal, because the market's best days tend to cluster right next to its worst days.

If you were to miss just 10 of the best days in the market over the last 20 years, your returns would be cut in half (source)!

So doing your best to "buy low and sell high" is not only hard, but the penalty for getting it wrong is really high.

When you sell an investment for more than you paid (so your investment has grown in value), the profit you get is called a capital gain.

If you held the investment for less than a year, that gain is taxed as ordinary income. Same rate as your paycheck.

If you held the investment for more than a year, it gets the long-term rate, which is meaningfully lower (0%, 15%, or 20% depending on your income, and a lot of students land in the 0% bracket).

So the "I'll just move money around when it feels right" strategy means paying the higher rate, thereby reducing the overall return on your investments.

There are full-time professionals that spend their nine to really late trying to outperform the market. Sometimes they do. Often they don't.

Famously, Warren Buffett bet index funds would beat a hedge fund (which trades regularly) on returns over 10 years and won.

While you could potentially be a talented investor, you may not be, and being a good investor requires a lot of time.

It may be more worth your time focusing on your studies and how to earn more, rather than how to lose your money in unique and exciting ways.

An index fund is an investment where the purchase of the fund spreads your money across tens, hundreds, or sometimes thousands of companies.

If one company spontaneously combusts into flames, you barely feel it. If one of them is the next Nvidia, you are along for the ride.

There is a tradeoff though. While you don't suffer if something goes wrong, you also give up the fantasy of picking the one winner.

And if you do have a winner in the group of companies in your index fund, you don't win quite as much as you would if you just owned the stock outright.

This one is psychological rather than numbers, and it is the reason the other four points are hard to actually follow.

Researchers have found that the pain of losing money is roughly twice as intense as the pleasure of gaining the same amount. A $100 loss stings about as much as a $200 gain feels good.

So when your portfolio drops 8%, your brain does not experience it as "a normal Tuesday in a 40-year plan." It experiences it as an emergency.

This is why it watching your investments too closely can backfire. You set the strategy that you believe in, and then you forget about it and come back when it's time to buy that boat in retirement.

Check quarterly or annually. But set the automatic transfer up and let it be the most boring expense in your life.

The Do-Nothing Calculator runs two portfolios side by side. One where the investments are held the whole time, the other where they are bought and sold regularly.

The cost of the taxes is factored in to the returns over time.

You can see immediately how selling at different rates and different time frames can affect your returns from the tax implications.

Also, quick reminder that I am not sponsored by any of the tools I note here. I wish I was! These are just the tools I use or build.

This week, do nothing.

If you already have money invested, set a calendar reminder to check it once in three months, and then close the app.

If you do not have money invested yet, set up an automatic transfer. Make sure it’s working, and then check in on it in three months.

The goal is to make investing a thing that happens to you rather than a thing you have to be brave about every week.

Boring compounds. ;)

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