Distribution Reinvestment

You invested in a private equity firm. They sold a big investment to Microsoft for all cash. You love the PE firm, so you take your cash distribution relating to this success, and you reinvest it in the firm's next fund. Nice job.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is Automatic Reinvestment?3 Views

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Finance a la shmoop... what is automatic reinvestment? alright you bought an index

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fund the focus companies whose names begin with the letter G, it's the G

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indexer or G-index so like you know it's a whole lot of groupings of Google a

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gaggle of GE, a glob of Gap, General Mills General Motors, Goldman Sachs you know [Lots of company logos]

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through the Garmin the GPS people that's your index fund all G's while your

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strategy and index picking may leave room for improvement while one element

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you want to take advantage of is the provision for automatic reinvestment

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that is for no incremental commission or fee instead of receiving your dividend

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as cash and spending it on silly things like rent and gas and food you reinvest [Person receiving dividend]

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your dividends and simply buy more shares of the G for good index fund the

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effect over time is that your fund compounds at a much higher rate than it

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would have had you just taken those cash distributions and run well how much

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faster does it compound well if it was to grow at 6% a year without the

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dividends reinvested and the dividends were about 3% a year then your total

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return would have been 9% using you know advanced calculus there and remember

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that rule of 72 thing well it takes an investment compounding at 6% that's 72 [Rule of 72 appears]

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divided by 6 which means that the investment there will take about 12

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years to double but in this case with dividends reinvested and we're gonna

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ignore taxes here it's growing at 9% a year so it takes only 72 divided by 9

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.....8 years to double with the

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automatic reinvestment feature kicking in and 8 is better than 12 when it comes

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to doubling your money in years that is and over time this is a really big deal [Man discussing automatic reinvestment]

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like if you started with 10 grand in savings and just left it invested for 25

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years well here's what it looked like note that you end up with almost double

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your money when you automatically reinvest the money rather than take it

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out as cash and also note you know our thing on taxes here if you have your

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investment in a taxable account as opposed to an IRA or a 401 K which is taxdeferred [Taxable account and IRA/401k piles of cash appear]

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that's how everything kind of plays out so the fund throws off lots of dividends

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which you reinvest not only will you not be taking the cash from those dividends

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but you'll have to pony up cash from some other source to pay the tax as you

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go if you hold your index fund you know in a taxable account anyway if you don't

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need the cash and have the discipline to just reinvest and well forget about it [Woman holding pile of cash]

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you'll be a whole lot richer in the end game and that'll happen right about the

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time you're too old to really enjoy it unfortunately youth is wasted on the [Kids sat on the grass talking]

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young, you'll be too senile to regret it though so that's that's upside right...

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