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Roberta Moberley Dickson is the 81-year-old widow of a prominent businessman and boasts more than $5 million in assets, but she filed for bankruptcy protection, citing a single creditor — her daughter, Mary Louise Dickson Shook — and a single debt: A $3.3 million judgment awarded last November by a Jefferson Circuit Court jury that found Dickson had cheated Shook out of her inheritance, the Courier-Journal reported yesterday. The verdict included $405,000 in punitive damages against Dickson for promising to give Shook $1.5 million if she would stop saying she was raped by her brother some 30 years earlier. By filing for bankruptcy, Dickson has halted collection on the judgment and avoided having to post a bond in the amount of the verdict while she appeals it to the Kentucky Court of Appeals. Shook has won an important ally: The U.S. Trustee has moved to dismiss Dickson’s petition, saying it was filed in “bad faith,” and that courts have defined bad faith to include “improper” prior conduct by the debtor and attempting to evade court orders. However, Dickson’s lawyer said there was “nothing bad faith” about the filing. He said the chapter 11 was needed to keep Shook, who lives out of state, from collecting the judgment, spending all of the money and then losing the appeal and being unable to repay it to her mother. In its motion, the U.S. Trustee's Office says that if Chief Bankruptcy Judge Tracey N. Wise doesn’t throw out the case altogether, she should appoint an outside lawyer to protect or liquidate the assets in “trustworthy fashion.”

More than 37 percent of California households have so little cash saved that they couldn’t live at the poverty level for even three months if they lost a job or suffered another significant loss of income, the Pasadena Star-News reported yesterday. That’s the grim assessment of the 2017 Prosperity Now Scorecard. The report was compiled by Prosperity Now, a Washington, D.C.-based organization seeking to help people — particularly people of color and those with limited income — achieve financial security and prosperity. The scorecard also shows that 46 percent of households in California didn’t set aside any savings for emergencies over the past year, a higher percentage than the national rate of 43.7 percent. It doesn’t help that 21.1 percent of California jobs are in low-wage occupations. The scorecard found that 21.4 percent of Californians experienced income volatility over the past year, a situation that most often results from irregular job schedules. The report finds that nearly 20 million U.S. households (16.9 percent of the total) have zero or negative net worth. That means they owe more than they own. The scorecard suggests several policies that could help get struggling households on track.