Provident Life & Trust Co. v. Fidelity Insurance

Citations

• 203 Pa. 82
• 52 A. 34
• 1902 Pa. LEXIS 656

Syllabus

<p>Insurance — Life insurance — Assignment of policy — Assignment for creditors — Damnosa haer editas.</p> <p>Where at the time of an assignment for creditors there is in existence an endowment policy on the life of the assignor payable to him eight years thereafter if he should reach the age of sixty years, or if he should die in the mean time to his wife and children, and the assignee does not include the policy in his inventory, or in his account subsequently filed, and never pays any premiums out of the assigned estate to keep it alive, but subsequently the assignor in pursuance of an antenuptial agreement wiLli his second wife, who had no knowledge of the assignment for creditors, assigns his interest in the policy to her, and thereafter makes another assignment of his interest in the policy to the assignee individually and another person to secure debts of their own, and the latter parties pay the premiums and keep the policy alive, an assignee for creditors substituted in the place of the original assignee is not entitled to the proceeds of the policy, because (1) the original assignee had in fact abandoned it; (2) because such assignee had a right to abandon it, and (3) because the right of the second wife had intervened.</p> <p>In such a case the administrator of the second wife who had died before the policy matured, is entitled to the fund, and if it passes under the intestate laws to her husband as her sole representative it does so subject to his assignments after her death, and the attachments issued against him, as if he had never owned the policy, and his wife had acquired the title to it through a stranger. The ultimate distribution of the proceeds of the policy belongs to the orphans’ court when the wife’s administrator shall have filed an account.</p>