What to do with money you've no time to manage

If you have money to invest and no time to manage it, the realistic options are fewer than the internet suggests: a low-cost index fund, a robo-advisor, or following a verifiable public investor. Ranked by cost and by how much judgement you hand off, an index fund is cheapest and asks nothing of anyone — roughly 0.03% a year for a fund like Vanguard's VOO, enough to have beaten 89.5% of active US large-cap funds over the fifteen years to 2024 (SPIVA US Year-End 2024). A robo-advisor sits above it, adding diversification and automatic maintenance for about 0.3–0.6% a year. Following an investor is free of management fee but hands you one person's portfolio and single-manager risk, and is worth only as much as that person's record is real. None of these should be chosen on advertised return.

Why "no time" narrows the field usefully

Having no time to manage money is a feature of the decision, not a problem with it. It rules out anything that needs monitoring, timing, or regular decisions, which is most of what gets marketed to retail investors — and it leaves the three hands-off routes above, each of which runs without you once set up. That is a good position to be in, because the hands-off options are also, not coincidentally, the ones the evidence favours: low cost and low activity beat high cost and high activity across almost every long-run study. The task is not to find something clever; it is to pick the hands-off route that fits your cost tolerance and your appetite for single-manager risk.

Option 1: the index fund (the honest default)

Buy a broad, low-cost index fund and leave it alone. This is the correct default for most people and the benchmark the other two must beat: near-zero cost, total diversification, no reliance on any manager, and a return that has quietly outperformed the large majority of professionals. It asks nothing of you beyond continuing to add to it, and its main risk is behavioural — selling in a downturn — rather than anything in the product. If you read no further, an index fund is a defensible answer to the whole question.

Option 2: the robo-advisor (diversification, automated)

Pay roughly 0.3–0.6% a year to have a diversified portfolio built and maintained for you. A robo-advisor adds risk-profiling, automatic rebalancing, and often tax optimisation on top of what are usually index funds — convenience and tidiness for a modest fee. The honest caveat is that it mostly holds funds you could buy directly for about 0.03%, so you are paying the difference for automation, not for better investments. For someone who wants diversification and genuinely never to touch it, that can be worth it; the fuller comparison is in copy trading vs a robo-advisor.

Option 3: following a public investor (single-manager, verifiable)

Mirror one investor's actual portfolio, for no management fee, if you want active selection and can check the record. This is the only one of the three that is not automatically diversified and not automatic-by-design: you are following one person's holdings and their judgement, which is why it carries no fee but more single-manager risk. It is a serious option only when the record survives scrutiny — real money, full history, benchmarked, bad years shown, verifiable without asking — the checklist is in how to verify an investor's track record, and the index-versus-copy trade-off is in copy trading vs index funds.

How to actually choose

Work down the list and stop at the first one that fits. If you just want the market's return at the lowest cost, stop at the index fund. If you want diversification handled for you and don't mind ~0.3–0.6% for the convenience, stop at the robo-advisor. Only continue to following an investor if you specifically want active, single-manager selection and have found a record you can verify and drawdowns you can hold — and if you're unsure at that step, the honest answer is to go back up to the index fund. Nothing here is a recommendation of a specific product; it is the map, and where the last option lands, the portfolio that more than 4,500 people copy is public in full. Past performance is not a promise of future results.