Product Descriptions

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DRIP Investing
Vs.
Traditional Brokerages

The chief foil to investing success is the tendency to react emotionally to day-to-day stock price movements. Should you buy on the dip or sell? You won’t know until it’s too late.

The ease of action in a brokerage account entices you to act. With DRIPs, investors establish a plan to build holdings by making scheduled (or unscheduled) investments over a period of years until the dividends alone keep the account growing. This subtle difference accounts, for the success-advantage DRIP investors enjoy.

The ability to diversify and to invest dollar amounts (instead of buying shares) makes the difference.

If you want to end up with a lower cost per share than the average price of the shares during the investing period, you don’t want to be buying the same number of shares regularly—but you do want to invest the same amount of money. The difference will become clear as you read on. (A few traditional brokerages are now adopting measures to provide this advantages but it’s easier to implement in a DRIP portfolio.)

Here’s why those are two critical factors:

Diversifying among market sectors is an uncontested risk-reducing strategy. Diversifying holdings within a traditional brokerage account, where you generally buy in 100 share lots, is more limiting than diversifying among DRIP companies, where a small dollar amount is all you need to open an account (or as a shareholder by owning even a single share of company stock).

Buy more, low--and less, high.

It's Easy to Get Started

After you have read the information about direct investing on this site, you may be wondering what to do next. Here are the steps to get started investing directly.

1. Go to the home page: Click in "FORMS" and you will find the DRIP ENROLLMENT ORDER FORM. (You may also order online by clicking "DRIP Enrollments,” which will take you to the Temper Enrollment Service site.
2. To order by mail, print the DRIP Enrollment Form and fill in the names and the symbol(s) of the company or companies you want. Enter the number of shares you wish to buy. (You must order the minimum number to qualify for enrollment in the plan, which is generally one share.) To determine the minimum number of shares to qualify for enrollment in a plan, enter the symbol in the "Find DRIP" box at top left of every page. Enter symbol, then view "Shares to qualify."
3. You must indicate the form of registration that you prefer (i.e.: individual, joint ownership, custodian in the name of a minor, etc.). Information about proper registration is provided on the back of the Enrollment Order Form.
Click the form shown below to see a sample of a completed order: