I got an email last week from a reader who said she had $500 to invest and spent three hours trying to pick the "right" fund. Three hours. I laughed, but not at her. At the situation. Because the investing world has done a genuinely terrible job of making this seem simple.

A recent piece over on MSN points new investors toward a single ETF, and the reasoning is sound. You do not need a portfolio of fifteen funds. You need to start.

The ETF they highlight is the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, ticker VOO. If you are new to this, here is what it does: it buys you a tiny slice of 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in America, in one purchase, for a fee of about three cents per year on every $100 invested. That fee is so close to free it barely matters.

The math on why starting matters more than optimizing is pretty simple. Say you are 30 years old and you put $300 a month into VOO. Historically, the S&P 500 has returned about 10 percent annually before inflation. Run those numbers through any compound interest calculator and you will see that the cost of waiting five years is not small. Every year you delay is a year of contributions you miss, and more importantly, a year of compounding you lose on the money you would have already invested. The gap grows wider the longer you wait.

In my experience, the thing that trips people up is not a lack of good options. It is the abundance of them. They want to know about crypto, or options, or some cloud computing fund their coworker mentioned. I understand the appeal. When I was 23 and opened my first brokerage account with $200 and a library book, I wanted to find the next big thing too. What I learned, slowly and expensively, is that boring wins.

One fund. Automatic contributions. Patience. That is the entire strategy for most people, and it works because it removes every decision that leads to mistakes. You do not need to time the market. You do not need to pick sectors. You buy, you hold, and the compounding does the heavy lifting over decades.

Now, I will say the same thing I always say: I am not a financial advisor, and this is perspective, not professional advice. Talk to someone who knows your specific situation before you make decisions. But if you are paralyzed by choices and have not started yet, a total market or S&P 500 index fund is a perfectly reasonable place to begin. The worst portfolio is the one you never actually fund.

Stop researching. Start investing. You can always learn more and adjust later. The clock on compounding does not wait for you to feel ready.