Recently, I checked my CPF balance and was pleased that my Special Account (SA) balance has exceeded the 2026 Full Retirement Sum (FRS) of S$220,400. Since my 40th birthday just recently passed, I’ll just consider this milestone tagged to it.
I took a while to reach FRS mainly because I only started contributing to CPF in my late 20s when I took up PR. Also after buying BTO which wiped out what little CPF Ordinary Account (OA) balance I had back then so I couldn’t transfer to SA for some time.
CPF finances only stabilised after getting our keys to our BTO around end 2016. Since then, I could afford to transfer OA regularly over to SA since the monthly payments for our 3-room BTO flat were pretty modest.
My wife and I decided that we would try to avoid upgrading or at least put it off for as long as we can, so we dedicated most of our OA to topping up our SA to FRS. Upside is we can hit FRS earlier (my wife hit it first a year or two ago), but downside is that we may not have enough in CPF OA to upgrade should we need/want to in future. There are always trade-offs – this is just one we settled on.
Achieving FRS means that our OA will start to fill up again. Previously, we have only been keeping about S$2k in our OA just in case one of us loses our income and we need that buffer to service our mortgage payments. Thankfully, that has not happened (Choy!).
Another great thing about hitting FRS is that basically the annual interest that CPF pays will cover for the increase in FRS limit every year, so there’s no need to top-up anymore indefinitely. Hence, we can now focus on investing our OA monies fully. We could still top-up our MA at the start of the year just so it’s up to max limit but not really necessary IMO.
As for investing OA, so far I’ve been using Endowus since they are approved for CPF investments. For CPF OA investments, I’ve set it up for S$500/month investments into Core Flagship portfolio. I might look to increase the monthly investments if OA grows too fast, unless we decide to start building up some OA for potentially upgrading.
Actually, there’s no real need to invest the excess OA since it attracts minimum 2.5% interest annually. Since CPF is supposed to be the conservative part of an overall portfolio geared towards retirement, keeping funds earning virtually risk-free 2.5% is not too shabby as well – all depends on your risk appetite.