Americans have many excuses for not investing. None of them stand up to this simple advice from Warren Buffett.

• Many avoid investing due to lack of money, knowledge or fear of losing, a new BlackRock survey shows.

• A simple solution to all of these problems is an S&P 500 index fund.

• Investing icon Warren Buffett has often recommended this approach.

More than a third of Americans don’t own stocks, and a new BlackRock survey finds that holdouts cite many reasons for not being in the market.

In its People & Money report released Thursday, BlackRock listed some of the reasons why people who don’t invest say they stay away.

Among the most common are not having enough money, not feeling like you know enough about investing, and being afraid of losses.

Those are all fair explanations for not putting your money to work. But there’s one simple tip from investing icon Warren Buffett that offers a solution for each of them: invest in an S&P 500 index fund, a product that tracks the performance of roughly the 500 largest U.S. stocks.

“Over the years, I have often been asked for investment advice, and in the process of responding, I have learned a lot about human behavior,” Buffett said in his 2017 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. “My usual recommendation has been a low-cost S&P 500 index fund.”

So, let’s go over each of the reasons above, starting with the hardest one: not having enough money. If you’ve never done it, investing is something that may feel like you need to save thousands of dollars to get started. There are actually some very low-cost entry points. For example, the Schwab S&P 500 index fund (SWPPX) trades at around $17 per share. You can also buy fractional shares of funds that trade at a higher price level, but in the end it’s pretty much the same.

While investing small amounts may seem pointless, it’s more about getting started and developing habits: after a few years, if you keep at it, you’ll have accumulated a lot of money thanks to both your contributions and your compounded returns.

Second: not feeling like you know enough about investing. The financial markets can be daunting, but like anything, once you do it, it gets easier. Plus, the nice thing about buying an index fund is that you don’t really need to know much about investing. Your money will sit passively in a diversified group of stocks for years.

However, if you really think you have questions that need to be addressed, you can always visit a physical branch of an advisor like Charles Schwab or Fidelity, said Chris Chen, certified financial planner and founder of Insight Financial Strategists.

“They have people at the counter waiting for them to invest their money and answer their questions, and it’s basically free,” Chen told Business Insider.

Finally: being afraid of losing money. It’s what keeps even the most successful investors awake.

But the reality is that if you have a long-term time horizon and resist the temptation to sell at the first sign of trouble, the S&P 500 has historically recovered from its setbacks.

Earlier this year, Yale economist William Goetzmann told Business Insider that investors tend to overestimate the odds of an imminent stock market crash and tend to forget that such declines don’t last.

Goetzmann’s research shows that when the market crashes after a big period of profitability, there is a 99% chance those losses will have been recovered five years later.

“If you wait five years after this event, you’ll be better off. That’s what I’m telling you,” he said.

Of course, S&P 500 index funds aren’t the only products out there. Jason Draho, head of Americas asset allocation at UBS Global Wealth Management, said he would prefer people invest in a global index fund (an example would be Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (VT)), since valuations of the S&P 500 are high and the index is highly concentrated in a select few stocks.

U.S. stocks have outperformed the rest of the world over the past decade and a half. Since the March 2009 market lows, the Vanguard Total World Stock ETF is up 423%, while the S&P 500 is up 800%. However, the United States has underperformed international stocks so far this year, and some Wall Street analysts predict that global markets will outperform the United States in the coming years.

There’s also something to be said for the visibility of the S&P 500: It’s the benchmark that American investors tend to follow, and you can track its performance on the nightly news.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter much: it’s more about getting things going.

“The important thing for someone just starting out is to get started,” Chen said.

Read the original article on Business Insider