I'm working with money so I need my results to be accurate but I only need a precision of 2 decimal points (cents). Is BigDecimal needed to guarantee results of multiplication/division are accurate?
BigDecimal is a very appropriate type for decimal fraction arithmetic with a known number of digits after the decimal point. You can use an integer type and keep track of the multiplier yourself, but that involves doing in your code work that could be automated.
As well as managing the digits after the decimal point, BigDecimal will also expand the number of stored digits as needed - many business and government financial calculations involve sums too large to store in cents in an int.
I would consider avoiding it only if you need to store a very large array of amounts of money, and are short of memory.