[bigbootch]

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How long are u looking to invest the money for?

Index funds would probably be your best option if you are not familiar with the stock market.

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The question isn't so much whether to put it into index funds or not, it's more what asset classes of index funds to put it in. Broadly speaking, some of the major ones you may want to consider are: money market, bonds, domestic stocks, and foreign stocks.

Regardless of which you end up going for, I would highly highly recommend opening up a Vanguard account and buying their funds. Vanguard is the best, and it's not close.

That said, I would probably recommend 50/50 split of money market and bonds. You should do the math and figure out which would be better for your situation, tax-exempt or not. For money market, the two are VMSXX/VMMXX, and for bonds the two are VWIUX/VBTLX.

To address what everyone else here is telling you, to put it into stocks (i.e. sp500 index fund), well you can do that but I wouldn't recommend it. Malkiel and Bogle wrote some very good books, but to focus simply on those works and ignore all other factors would be short sighted.