Vanguard Brokerage Account

Unless you keep $50k in vanguard funds, your trades costs $20 each (The first 25 are only $7). I only plan to use my Vanguard brokerage account on stock purchases that I plan to buy and hold for DRIP purposes. e.g. I bought some MO and it will will stay in the vanguard account b/c they offer a free DRIP program.

I have a scottrade account and the Flexible reinvestment program they have leaves a lot to be desired if you want to reinvest your dividends.

There was a thread on this a couple of months ago. Here's the link. LINK

To be honest, I haven't compared Scottrade to other brokerages in a while so I don't konw how their dividend reinvestment works.

Scottrade works like this....
step 1 - pick which securities you want the dividends to go into the FRIP. these dividends go into a pool of funds for your FRIP (Flexible Reinvestment Program).

step 2 - choose up to 5 of your current securities to buy from the pool. you also have to allocate a percentage to the securities. e.g. 50% for XOM, 15% CHX, 15% T, 10% VZ, & 10% GOOGL. so 50% of your dividend pool will be used to buy XOM every month or quarter.

Here's the pain in the arse about this setup. FRIP can only buy whole shares and you have to have enough money in your FRIP pool to buy at least one share of each of the securities you selected. So with my above example, GOOGL is trading over $500 right now. So you need over $5,000 in you FRIP pool to buy a share of GOOGL. Until you have enough money to buy that share of GOOGL, FRIP won't buy the other securties you've choosen. This is somewhat of an extreme example. Naturally you'd never set something up like I described above. But scottrade's program takes some planning. It is best to just list your lower priced stocks to be purchased.

Right now I have three: F, IBKC, & T. I have enough money to buy F & T, but I beed a few more bucks in my FRIP to afford the IBKC share. So until my next dividends comes in, Scottrade won't buy any of my three b/c I can't afford IBKC.

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Unless you keep $50k in vanguard funds, your trades costs $20 each (The first 25 are only $7).

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You can buy Vanguard funds for no trading fee. I invest in their S&P Index Fund bi-weekly with no fee. The management fee is like 0.05% as well. May not be what you're looking for, but it's something to consider.