Today I opened a new account with Sharebuilder that will be my main dividend portfolio account. I chose sharebuilder for several reasons:
1. They are owned by Capital One In fact, the sharebuilder domain is changing to capitaloneinvesting.com sometime this month (Jun '15). I don't have any ties or partiality toward Capital One, but I do know they are a big name in banking. I at least have not heard of any negative news surrounding them recently.
2. Free Dividend Reinvesting Sharebuilder reinvests dividends for free so its a perfect candidate for a DRIP account. There is an option to disable it, but for my goals, this is exactly what I want. Cuts on fees and is hassle free.
3. 6.95 Real Time Trades This isnt the lowest in the industry (see TradeKing at $3.95), but its also a reasonable price. If, for whatever reason, I needed to sell something immediately, I could do it and not pay $15 per trade or even higher.
4. Automatic Investing For a transaction fee of 3.95 ($2 if a Costco member, Thanks Keith!) per stock you choose, you can set up automatic investing which will automatically take your cash balance in an account and invest it in stocks that you have already set up. This is a $3.95 fee charged for each stock, each time it is bought, on Tuesdays.
5. Dollar based investing As with other brokerages, you can buy a dollar amount of a stock instead of needing to buy full shares. This is only available with Automatic Investing, but it is a great option because it puts every dollar to work, and no math is required to figure out how many shares you can buy.
I have been using Sharebuilder for about seven years and had no problems with them ever. I like them for all the reasons you list especially for the free dividend reinvestment. If you are a Costco member the commish is even less https://www.sharebuilder.com/costco which is how I have my plan set up. It's only $2 a trade for the automatic buys. You can see my portfolio here http://divhut.com/portfolio/ Look forward to following you on your dividend growth journey.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip, Keith! I am going to add that to the post and ill give you credit for it. Every little bit of savings helps!
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