Most people think that investing is complicated, risky, and best left to professionals. Pretty much everybody you will talk to has the same view.

That is not an accident.

The financial services industry has spent decades building an image of itself as essential. The language is technical, the products are confusing, and the people selling them are very good at making ordinary investors feel out of their depth. The overall message is always the same: this is all terribly difficult, so you must pay us to do it for you.

But for most people, that simply isn’t true.

Successful investing does not require brilliance. It does not require inside information. It does not require staring at charts all day, making dramatic trades, or paying somebody a percentage of your wealth to put your money into products you could buy yourself.

What it requires is much simpler than that:

That’s it.

Now, to be fair, there are people with genuinely complicated financial lives. If you have a large estate, multiple businesses, a complex tax situation, inheritance planning issues, trusts, divorce complications, or cross-border assets, then proper specialist advice may well be worth paying for.

But that is not most people.

Most people do not need an expensive adviser to build them a labyrinth of mediocre funds wrapped in jargon and annual charges. Most people just need to know how to open the right account, buy sensible investments, keep costs low, and stay invested.

Once you understand those things, you are no longer helpless.

In fact, you are already in a better position than many people who are paying for “expert” help and not getting expert results.

That is the part the industry would rather you didn’t notice.

A lot of financial advice is really just expensive reassurance. It is there to make you feel looked after, not necessarily to make you richer. And if the adviser underperforms a simple market tracker while charging you for the privilege, you are not really being advised. You are being milked.

Warren Buffett (the world’s most famous investor, and the richest man in the world before he gave away half of it) said that for most people the best approach is simply to buy a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, add when you can to it over time, and leave it alone to grow.

The S&P 500 is an index that measures the performance of the top 500 companies in America. These are global businesses, that you have heard of, and that you use every day. Most of them have been around for decades and have survived recessions, wars, pandemics, and social changes. Although they are American companies, they operate globally, and the S&P 500 is a good proxy for the stockmarket as a whole.

Over the last 100 years, it has averaged around 10% growth per year. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes negative, but whatever has happened it always comes back to make new highs. Even after Covid. Even after the great financial crash.

If you simply buy a low-cost tracker fund that mirrors the performance of the S&P 500 and do nothing more, you will outperform the majority of managed portfolios, and professional advisers.

Here is a shocking fact:

Whilst typical adviser fees of 1% or 2%, don’t sound like much, over time they have a massive effect on your actual returns, diminishing them still further.

Over a lifetime, this could cost you tens of thousands of pounds, if not a lot more.

I am not saying nobody ever needs professional advice. Some people do have complicated situations.

But most people can do far more for themselves than they realise.

You do not need to become a financial wizard.

You just need to understand enough to stop handing over your future to people who benefit from keeping you dependent.

That is the idea behind Tim’s Wealth Letter.

I’m not a financial adviser, and nothing I write is personal financial advice. But I am someone who has done this with real money, for real, over a long period of time — and I think that counts for something.

Every week I’ll share ideas, insights and practical guidance on how to manage your own investments — and do it better than most people who pay professionals to do it for them.

If you’re just getting started, my eBook — Make Yourself Rich — will give you everything you need to get set up, step by step. It takes a couple of hours to read, and by the end of it you’ll have a complete investment strategy you can put into action straight away.

And if you want to follow exactly what I’m investing in, why, and how it’s performing — including the individual stocks I hold alongside my core ETF portfolio — that’s what the paid subscription is for. More on that soon.