Reinvest the payment and the pile buys more of itself. Spend it and the snowball stops. On this site that is a switch you can flip, not a vibe.
A dividend hits the account. Two honest uses. Send it back in and buy more of the thing that paid you. Take it out and live on it.
The internet calls the first one DRIP, which is just "the payment buys more shares" with a product name stuck on. The goblin's version is broader: the payment goes into the same pool as any fresh money, and the pool buys whole shares in whichever building pillar is currently the weaker floor. Legal & General and the monthly fund are not in that queue. They are finished enough. The two still being built get the cash.
The second use is spending it. That is allowed. It is also how a snowball stops being a snowball. Income you eat does not buy the next share. The next share is what would have paid you next year.
What the switch actually does
Three presets, same engine, today's ledger. The live dates and the live run-rate are on /freedom, because typing them here is how they go stale.
The plan: new money on top of the dividends, all of it reinvested, aimed at the goblin's default freedom number (targets hit). The walk prints a date. The two building pillars complete on the way. That is the headline the rest of the site quotes.
Dividends only: not a penny of new money, still reinvesting what lands. The pile feeds itself. The walk prints a later date. Still a date. The machine does not need the salary. It just wants the payments sent back in.
Spend it all: reinvestment off. Starting income is whatever the ledger says today. Ending income, thirty years later, is the same number. No freedom date. The horizon is what makes that simulation terminate rather than spin. Cash accumulates. The wage does not move. That is the honest answer to "what if I just take it".
The manifesto puts this as a rule, not a vibe: income is mostly reinvested until the freedom number is hit. After that the question changes. Before that, spending the coupon is eating seed corn and calling it dinner.
[I am not telling you to DRIP, or to never take a payment. I am telling you what this cave's own engine says the two choices are worth, on this ledger, with these prices. Your tax wrapper, your bills, and your nerves are not in the model.]
What a payment looks like before you spend it
Here is one from a pillar the snowball is still buying. CQS New City High Yield Fund paid 1.52p per share in August 2026. I owned 23,050 shares. £350 landed. Small next to a June lump. Real next to a calendar. If it goes back in, it is more shares in the bag that pays February, May, August and November. If it comes out, it is a meal, and next August is the same size.
I aimed this bag at twenty-five thousand shares. I stopped at 23,050. Close enough that the goblin brain still grumbled, and still a real count that qualified for the boosted quarter because every share was in before the July 30 ex-div. Reinvesting is how you stop caring about the round number. Spending the coupon is how you freeze the count on purpose and call it a lifestyle.
The first payments are the ones people spend because they feel like pocket money. Pocket money that buys more of the bag is how a hundred quid of yield turns into a floor. Pocket money that disappears is how you stay at Level 2 with a nicer coffee habit.
You will hit a month where a bill and a payment arrive in the same week and the bill looks more urgent. That is what the cash cushion is for. That is not what the coupon is for. Mixing them is how a snowball gets described in the past tense.
Not financial advice. Just one goblin's switch, run on his own numbers, so "I'll start reinvesting later" has a date attached rather than a vibe.
Once the pile is actually covering a real bill, the question changes shape. That's When the income covers a bill: what changes and what doesn't.