reinvest dividends or not?

[rayray]

It depends, I have dripped in retirement accounts and still do in my kplan. In the kplan I automatically reinvest all dividends and capital payout gains because the options are few and far in-between, some are simply just not allowed, for instance, the mutual fund dividends and short/long term gains there is no option to receive those payouts into my kplan's MMA--it simply is not offered as an option. But, a lot of times in the kplan I build up my MMA and purchase shares/units after the dividends/gains are paid out in that particular fund.

In one IRA account, there's only two dividend paying stocks so to make it easy those are re-invested. Set on auto-pilot is easy and it still keeps the snowball rolling. As Kerim stated collecting a few hundred dollars to even a little over a 1k a year in dividends just doesn't make enough sense to collect the cash.

The other IRA and ROTH are all collected in cash and reinvested once a month in what I feel is a quality company at a reasonable price. If there's a recession I may or may not throw it on auto-pilot.

The brokerage account is always collected in cash due to taxes in case I do sell something--I don't want to deal with multiple purchase prices if and or when I do decide to sell something.

So, for me...the answer is

It depends.