Selling General Electric Stock in my DRIP

I just sold my GE stock today that I had been DRIPing directly through the company. I sold despite the fact that I feel it is a great stock, especially at its current price. (They even just recently raised the dividend to 0.17/share/quarter.) The reason why was that I do all of my investing through Schwab. Overtime, record keeping is getting more and more difficult and having everything consolidated into one location will be very helpful. I also will be able to add to the capital loss carryover that I’ve had for a number of years now. I will even be able to effectively continue reinvesting the dividends for free, which is something that Schwab allows you to do; the downside being that I lose the ability to buy small amounts of shares. Schwab’s commissions are good but not close to the $1 per transactions that direct investing allowed. I’ll have to wait and purchase in large enough amounts to make the commission reasonable. Unfortunately, before buying GE stock with Schwab, I’ll have to wait 30 days so that the Wash Sales rule does not apply.

I feel that while I will lose money (and have lost in the 7 years I’ve been investing in GE) in the short term, it will be the smart move for the future. With how little my dividends are now, reinvesting them is smart, but in the future I might want to collect the dividends and use them to purchase something else. By doing everything at Schwab, I’ll more easily be able to move this money around.