Finally an update!

Sorry about the dearth of posts. I am trying to finish my MBA, and I haven't made much time for this. We added a couple holdings, such as State Auto Financial (STFC, QDV 36%) and LSI Industries (LYTS, QDV 30%). Both are great dividend growers, and we think they will weather the current market slowdown quite nicely.

We also had a spin-off of Philip Morris Intl (PM) from Altria (MO). Now we have exactly 50 holdings! As my broker mentioned, "looks like you have a mini mutual fund there!"

Since the market has rebounded a bit our relative performance to the Wilshire has suffered. That is the defensive nature of the portfolio. It has not been bad, with an outperformance of 3.5% over the Wilshire since Oct 2006. Keep in mind this excludes dividends, so if we averaged 3% that makes our performance around 6.5% better than the Wilshire so far. Portfolio QDV has remained excellent at over 21% even with some slowing dividend growth for some individual issues. We had one dividend cut, which was Southern Copper (PCU) but it is an ADR and more volatile than many of our other holdings. We are watching closely to see if dividend growth resumes over the next couple of quarters. One of our bank holdings is Suntrust (STI) which is the riskiest bank in our portfolio, but so far, no dividend cut. All in all, we're very pleased at how well our dividend portfolio has held up and we're getting a nice, stable, yet growing dividend stream, that we will use to plow back into attractive dividend growers until retirement. By then we hope to have a large monthly cash flow to fund a very comfortable retirement! I hope the market has been kind to all of you!