A little German saying ...

There is a German saying "Kleinvieh macht auch Mist" -- the direct translation would be that "small animals also create dung". The more proper English saying would be that "Many pennies make a dollar" .

The "dung" in my MFI portfolio has been dividend payments. I just have not paid that much attention to it. But sure enough, after about 6 month of owning a number of stocks it has added up to "make a dollar" -- actually over $600.

Now this creates several problems for me:

- now I have to add these dividend payments into my returns for the MFI portfolio, which sounds easier said than done, because most portfolio trackers (I use Yahoo and Morningstar) are not exactly set up for this

- the next problem is what to do with the money (true - this is always a good problem to have) - but you can not really invest $28.75 at a time >> I will probably have to always wait until the next quarterly purchases and reinvest the money then.

- I don't know about other people, but why is it that I have paid quite a bit of attention and worry to the transaction cost of managing the MFI portfolio, but it takes me 6 month to start thinking about the dividends ??