The Macon Telegraph from Macon, Georgia • 27

QnjcJHaconQrdegraptj Business Obituaries 5C Classifieds 8C Crossword puzzle 15C Aries likely to hit jackpot Horoscope 1 5C Sunday Dec 31 1995 1C Investors guide Bill Doyle How to plan for coverage I am concerned about having adequate medical insurance coverage when I retire in five years at age 68 My wife will then be 65 To meet this expense I intend to invest a total of about $30000 in eight stocks that have shown consistently solid price gains and dividend increases during the past 10 years My thought is that in live years the dividends from these stocks will pay for the health insurance policy we will need to supplement Medicare I would think these stocks will provide a better return to offset future infla tion than conservative invest ments in municipal bonds Do you agree? virtually no doubt that investments in the eight excellent stocks you named in your letter will far outperform municipal bonds But to accomplish what you have in mind the dividends on those stocks will have to increase at a rate far outpacing inflation Although inflation has subsided it is not dead yet The average current yield annual dividend divided by mar ket price on those stocks is just about 4 percent On $30000 that works out to $1200 a year And $1200 would not buy coverage supple mental medical insurance for you and your wife today So you are counting on those stocks increasing their dividend payments Great! But medical insurance premiums have risen in the past and certainly will con tinue to do so I discourage you from going ahead with your invest ment plan but I suspect you will have to come up with additional money to pay the Medigap premi ums because the dividends from those eight stocks be suffi cient What should the execu fee be for handling an estate with a gross value over $800000? Three lawyers two accountants and an Internal Revenue Service employee gave me different answers fees are set by law in all states either as a per centage of the value or as "reasonable Check that with the office of the secretary of state in your capital If the fee is not specified as a percentage really open sea son for the executor to charge whatever fee will be allowed by the judge of the court overseeing the settlement family members and friends acting as executors often waive the fees I am having trouble get ting a $500 US savings bond that was left to me by an aunt who died in 1993 1 know the serial number The problem is that the executor has the bond and I cannot get it from him I have written to him tele phoned him and even gone to his home He does not reply to my letters or answer the phone or doorbell What can I do? A Take your story to the court where your aunt's will was probated The court clerk at the courthouse in the county where your aunt lived can point you in the right direction The executor is required to distribute the assets after paying debts taxes and other expenses according to the terms of the will or accord ing to a settlement agreement signed by all beneficiaries Assuming the savings bond was left to you in your will that executor apparently is fracturing the rules to a fare thee well Based on your story the executor is due to gel his knuckles rapixid by a judge Send questions to Hill Doyle The Investors' Guide King eatures 235 45th St New York 10017 Doyle welcomes written questions but he can pro vide answers only through the col umn 4' The rating game plan to challenge WMAZ a risky gamble that could pay off big in era of TV buyouts By Mike Billips The Macon Telegraph Gocom Television is pumping more than $1 million into equip ment improvements and more than doubling the staff at WGXA TV Channel 24 hoping the investment will translate into more viewers and thus more advertising dollars The strategy is nothing unusual on a national scale Broadcasting companies snapped up stations all over the country in 1995 driving prices to above 11 times annual rev enues In July Gocom paid $1175 million to buy WGXA from its founders Russell Rowe Communications of Atlanta But bid is more of a gamble than it might be in some other markets Boosting ratings in Macon at the expense of rival WMAZ TV Channel 13 will mean changing viewing patterns that have been set over decades they talk about the rat asked WMAZ general manager Don McGouirk when asked to comment on WGXA think domination of the local TV market is tremendous it is among the five top rated local sta tions in the United States WMAZ owns the top 17 slots in the local weekly ratings and it is particular ly strong in local news the area where WGXA plans to make its strongest push the top rated show inMacon? Some other prime time network favorite? Nope Channel 13's at 6 pm which holds five of the top 10 week ly slots rivaled only by the Evening holder of the other five In the November Nielsen rat ings scored an average rating of 34 meaning that 34 percent of all the television households in the area watched it with a 58 share meaning that 58 percent of the televisions turned on were tuned to its channel By comparison at 5:30 pm scored a 4 rat ing and a 9 share down 25 percent from the same period in 1994 Changing those numbers is the only way for investment to pay off because advertising rates are set by ratings and even network affiliates which receive payments to run network program Danriy GHtetandThe Macon degraph as Jr Jg am JggP "I 11 i Vg 1 irf Jr la I I ShHHEh i WPGA engineer Len Register runs cable at the station's new orsyth Street location to a dish used to receive ABC signals from a satellite Monday morning WGXA TV and WPGA TV switch network affiliations Within the last few months WGXA and WMAZ TV also changed ownership ing get the bulk of their rev enue from local advertising Affiliates of the ox network which WGXA will join on Jan 1 get no payments from the network which runs a more limited schedule than the Big Three networks previous owners kept the opera tion in the black by cutting expenses ceding to WMAZ the dominant position But Ric Gorman president is tak ing a different tack I met the staff for the first time in ebruary after we filed with the CC our intention to purchase the station everyone looked like deer caught in the Gorman said worry was that we were going to come in and cut some he said in the last 4 12 months since we closed the Monday morning WGXA TV Channel 24 will switch from ABC and join the ox network while WPGA TV Channel 58' will drop ox and pick up ABC Mass confusion is expected for at least a couple of weeks while viewers sort out the changes The story is on LA sale basically doubled the size of the WMAZ TV too went through a buyout in December when its parent broadcasting chain Multimedia Inc was bought by Gannett Co for $17 billion The reason for all the money Hying around locally and nationally is the potential payout National advertising revenues for local broad casters hit an estimated $98 billion in 1995 and profits of 50 percent or more are not of And the buying may not be over in Macon the 123rd largest market purchase of Multimedia gave 1 Gannett more than 12 stations the limit that one company may own as allowed by current federal law A new telecommunications law is being hammered out by Congress but the lat est report on negotiations was that relaxing the ownership limits was not acceptable to President Clinton So if federal law is not changed Gannett will have to sell some of its stations to get back within the 12 station limit And when it bought Mult imedia Gannett identified WMAZ as one of those stations it may choose to sell More homes are installing 2 phone lines New York Times News Service or Guy Phillips life with a sin gle telephone line finally became untenable eight months ago Phillips the host of a radio talk show in St Louis said he could no longer chat on the phone at home without the constant interruptions of calls for his wife or three chil dren He was also tying up the line for two hours a day sending and receiving electronic mail on his computer So the Phillipses did what near ly 7 million other American fami lies have done this year Theyhad additional lines installed the lines that I have now I would feel as though I was back in the Dark Phillips said in a telephone interview on one of the three lines now in his house In the biggest single year increase in new residential phone lines in the United States since the end of World War II the percent age of households with more than one line has nearly doubled this year to 16 percent as several long smoldering information age forces have ignited into a social phenome non Three decades ago it was the two car garage This year the two phone line household became a commonplace of modern life as fax machines home offices and com puter modems have proliferated Indeed much of the fuss sur rounding the overhaul of telecom munications laws still tied up in Congress concerns the rules that will govern the competition for putting more lines into American homes an absolute said red Voit a telecommunica tions analyst at the Yankee Group a market research firm in Boston He predicted that by the year 2000 as many as half the 97 mil lion households would have two or more phone lines The Phillipses decided on three so one could be set aside solely for computer on which he spends two hours a night browsing through tips from other radio talk show hosts that are distributed on a data service called Radio Online The children share the second line while the third is open for house hold calls or for Jacque Phillips to check in on the medical supply company she runs or some homes even three lines is not enough Consider Joe Wilson national sales manager of Cabot Safety Corp who just moved to Libertyville 111 from Ann Arbor Mich When he is not out making sales calls Wilson says he spends most of his time at his PC sending or receiving electronic mail and faxes to his headquarters in Massachusetts He and his wife Janine plan to sign up for America Online the com puter data service So when the Wilsons moved into their new house they ordered four lines from their phone company Ameritech: One is for personal calls one for business calls one for on line services and one for hexes and mail Sometimes just a second line suffices Amy Levy a consultant who works out of her house in sub urban Chicago maintains a sepa rate line for business calks leaving the other free for personal use by herself and her husband Samuel Levine "I like to have a separation Please see MORE 2C can brew a storm Ignoring fund for a Chicago Tribune As you throw away the holiday wrappings and start looking at their resulting bills there is a basic principle of personal finance you should keep in mind: Pay yourself first This is a simple rule that many American families have never learned Despite the media hype about the bull market in stocks and the ierils of the Social Security system a majority of America families arc saving or investing lit tle or nothing and still relying on Social Security fontheir retirement income understand how little people said David Wise professor of political economy at the John Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University Wise found that in 1991 the typical household headed by a person age 55 to 61 in other words house holds with breadwinners nearing retirement had financial assets (savings and investments) worth just $8300 Wise is an academician who studies the critical subject of household saving patterns Sadly his work and the work of his peers is going unnoticed in the Washington budget debate which is all about spending National sav ing has never been able to compete I with national spending as a sound bite issue In one of the great political blunders of the century the 1994 Republican revolution did not champion the cause of saving investment and economic growth To the delight of President Clinton and his pollsters the GOP agenda instead degenerated into mean spirited carping about curbs on spending for (and therefore by) the poor and the elderly Even the Democrats have joined in and the only question from sides is much?" Is it any won der that voters see a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans? Yet as any family knows there arc two ways to pull yourself out of financial straits spend less and save more true as a nation as well Instead of forcing the least fortunate of Americans to spend less a truly revolutionary fiscal policy would put first priority on encouraging all Americans rich and poor to save more rom a political perspective this concept could have been an easy long term winner for Republicans Democrats arc far more closely associated with the destructive notion that exempting savings from taxes Is a "tax expen diture" by the government benefit ing only the rich However it was during the Reagan presidency that the govern ment in a previous ill considered campaign to balance the federal budget foolishly reduced the eligi bility for individual retirement accounts Republican and Democratic policies towards saving are virtually identical because they are being fed by the same Treasury Department bureaucracy that thrives no matter who is in power It was said in 1986 and contin ues to be said by many experts in the Treasury and elsewhere that tax incentives for savings don't Please see REMEMBER 20.