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Time to start cleaning up

July 13th, 2021 at 02:37 am

Over the years I have had investments in a number of things.  Home, pension, brokerage, IRA, 457, HSA, DRIP, Savings Bonds, CDs (maybe more?).  Anyway, as I get closer to retirement I realize that in some things fewer is better.  Or at least that is the case in this point in life.  

I've come to this realization through a number of things I have seen lately.  One of them has been working with my mother.  She has (and I have helped from time to time) gone through her things and has been getting rid of things she no longer needs.  This is a great thing to do as you get older.  It makes life easier, and certainly easier for someone else if that person has to come after you to deal with your items. 

For me this has been a slow process, but it is a good thing in any case.  Which comes to the posting.  For a time I had up to 8 DRIPs.  They made sense when I got them.  Little to no cost of purchase & ownership, sometimes special benefits to owning stock.    However in the past few years those benefits have become fleeting as brokerages now charge almost no fees.  Of the original 8 one was bought out to go private and one I sold last year to add a "loss" to my income to cut back on taxes at 24%.  This left me with six.  This year I was looking at the remaining ones, and two of them have started in the past years to charge a fee with each dividend to send me the money.  OK, not much, but still, it adds up to 2-3% of the dividend is lost.  So what to do....

Well I always heard you could transfer your ownership to other brokerages.  So I started to do research on transferring two of my remaining six to my brokerage.  I found the paperwork to fill out, and went to a local office last week.  The person there made it sound very easy, so asked for a little help on filling out the papers and in 15 minutes handed them over to the receptionist.  If this works without issue I may do another one or two later this year.   I have two I plan on keeping as DRIPs for now.  One I invest monthly, and the other gives a 5% discount on reinvested money.

Isn't the greatest thing ever I guess, but I think its a good thing.  And my GF who is doing taxes says it will greatly help in tax prep in the future.  Yeah, I think this is worth the effort.

 

UPDATE: Only one week later and both stocks have appeared in my brokerage - faster than I expected by a lot.  And it was so easy.  Now I'm considering if I should do this again with the remaining four I have.  Something more to consider this week.

2 Responses to “Time to start cleaning up”

  1. Petunia 100 Says:
    1626299320

    I like to simplify things as much as possible as well. Smile

  2. rob62521 Says:
    1627234679

    Good plan to simplify. That's terrific about how fast your stocks appeared at your brokerage. Usually things are slow as can be.

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