Hey @nayafia! There was a bit of discussion around that here as well CredSperiment: Opt-in or default-in? - #9 by decentralion
Today
My immediate thought is, hold out for a few weeks. This is just week 1’s payout and we’ve got something like 12 weeks left to go from there that are part of the experiment. Even if you can’t / don’t earn more cred during the experiment (though this forum post gives you some 
), you’ll receive more payouts. You can let them accumulate and do the actual withdrawal later, saving a bit on transaction fees.
Mana
You’re right that mana is a type of reinvestment approach. However as of now, mana isn’t implemented or finalized in what it will do. One often talked about feature that would let you grow your stake like a reinvestment, is to use it to boost particular tasks or past contributions. For the project that is an indicator you believe this will be an important task / contribution, which may be reason to prioritize it and may grant you some returns if you end up being right about that.
However, because this is still very much up for grabs. I think defaulting to $ payouts makes the most sense for now. Saving up a while until withdrawals make sense in terms of tx fees.
Future talk
So a few thoughts on your situation. Your current cred isn’t all that minor in relative terms. But right now is an experiment, $500/w going in at the top is a careful (training wheels on) budget, you can’t realistically hope to feed a dozen families. So as SourceCred matures and there’s more confidence in the system, one part is to fundraise and increase the budget. In the future if we can give such a budget a 10x, we’re talking a few paychecks worth going in at the top and would land you on $88 instead, for one week. Things like transaction fees are going to be less problematic.
Another noteworthy thing here is, most of your payout comes from cred you’ve earned around august/september last year. This is what the fast payout vs slow payout split does. To sketch a rough timeline. Last year, your work would have gotten you a fast payout first. Something on the order of $35 (assuming the same $500/w with 20% going to fast payout) in the week you did the work, then all those weeks between then and now you would have gotten slow payouts, starting in the 10s of dollars, and slowly decreasing over time as other people earn more cred and take more of the share. So over a longer period of time, we’re talking 100s of dollars over time. 10x the budget as mentioned before, now it’s 1000s of dollars. I think that’s in the respectable wages ballpark. Though I have to add, SourceCred as a project is still relatively small in that time period, this gradual shrinking of your relative share would go a lot faster if there were more people devoting time and earning cred.
What about the meantime? Something I find important is, between last years contributions and now, hopefully you’ve enjoyed working on a whole bunch of other awesome projects too , it’s what I would call being a “nomad”, contributing to a project for some time and moving on to different ones following your interests. Something I’d personally love to be able to do in the open-source space while being able to sustain myself. Maybe 10s-100s of dollars per week for one project isn’t significant enough to pay bills. But after roaming between projects for a while and building cred there, you might have 8-10 projects all paying you weekly in the 10s-100s of dollars region for multiple weeks. Now we’re getting somewhere!