You can buy all of the stocks in the S&P 500 index.

You can buy a low-cost mutual fund that invests in the S&P 500 index.

Or you can go an even cheaper and easier way.

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Warren Buffett, the famous investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, has long suggested that most investors would be better off just buying the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) index fund rather than picking individual stocks. Given the long-term rise in the index, that sounds like great advice, and historically, it has even worked out well if you bought when the market was near all-time highs, as it is today.

There are three broad ways, and very different, to buy the S&P 500 index. Here are the options, and the one that is probably the smartest choice if you are looking to buy the index this November.

Image source: Getty Images.

Before looking at how to buy the S&P 500 index, it is important to understand what the index does. It is a committee-selected list of roughly 500 U.S. stocks that the committee thinks are representative of the U.S. economy. The holdings are market-cap weighted, so the largest businesses have the biggest impact on the index’s performance, which is basically how the economy works.

So, in a nutshell, the S&P 500 is meant to track the U.S. economy. That’s why Warren Buffett suggests that most investors go with the index over trying to cherry-pick individual stocks. The U.S. economy has grown materially over the long term. Although there’s no way to know what the future holds, given the history, buying the S&P 500 seems like a decent call for people who know they need to invest in stocks but don’t have the time or desire to dive in too deep.

Data by YCharts. Note: Grey lines indicate recessionary periods.

The first way to buy the S&P 500 index is a path that no small investor should go down. It is to open a brokerage account and buy each individual stock in the exact proportion needed to reconstruct the index. The time and energy needed to do this would be shocking. You would also need a fairly large amount of money, given that 500 stocks is a rather large portfolio to build. Luckily, this isn’t something you need to do.

The second way to buy the S&P 500 index is to buy a mutual fund like Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFIAX). The benefits are that it is easy, since you only have to buy one investment, and it is cheap, noting the expense ratio of just 0.04%. That said, there are some potential limitations. For example, mutual funds can only be bought and sold at the end of a trading day. In other words, you can’t act as quickly as you might like if the markets are moving. And there is a minimum initial investment of $3,000 before you can buy the shares. That’s not a huge hurdle, but for new investors, it may be a deterrent.