You cannot withdraw interest earned, government grant and top ups from your CPF at 55??!!??

Recently, I was having a discussion with my colleague on CPF withdrawal at 55 when he mentioned that we cannot withdraw any top up monies or interest earned!

All the while I am only aware of the below 3 withdrawal scenario for CPF withdrawal at 55. We can withdraw

1) All of our Special Account and Ordinary Account savings if we have $5000 or less.
2) $5000 if we have less than FRS
3) $5000 or any amount above FRS if we have more than FRS

I was not aware that any top up monies and interest earned being excluded from the above! I have been faithfully topping up my SA and earning the 4% interest to build up my retirement nest egg for a meaningful withdrawal at 55!!

I did some research and found below information from CPF website here.


I have also sent and email to CPF to clarify the above statement. You can see the response from them below with an example as well below. Seems like the exclusion is only applicable to lump sum withdrawal from the Retirement Account only. Once your RA is formed, you can withdraw whatever that is left in our SA and OA anytime you like. For those who are intending to withdraw from your RA, do take note that the amount you can withdraw excludes any interest earned, government grants and retirement sum top ups.




Happy Value Investing
You cannot withdraw interest earned, government grant and top ups from your CPF at 55??!!?? You cannot withdraw interest earned, government grant and top ups from your CPF at 55??!!?? Reviewed by Valuewarrior on March 15, 2020 Rating: 5

7 comments:

  1. Hi Etutionx,

    This is why I have been putting money in SRS instead - when you really try to calculate the "returns" on CPF SA and you factor in that topups cannot be withdrawn or invested, it becomes a lot less attractive.

    I called CPF and they said that the topup monies be "used first" to form your CPF SA. I guess the best way to maximise everything is to be able to do the CPF SA shielding even with your top up monies and take OA monies for RA account formation. But thats not possible because you cannot shield top up monies and it has to form your RA...

    If you have topped up more than 40k of CPF SA monies then its probably not such a good deal, since 40k of SA will regardless cannot be shielded. Not sure if I am making sense!

    Sheng Shi - Endowus

    ReplyDelete
  2. The interest is for the top up only

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    Replies
    1. Did a check. Only top up interest is affected. And transfer from OA to SA is not considered as retirement sum top up.

      Delete
  3. You put your money where you hv no control and cpf policies can change anytime!

    ReplyDelete
  4. All this are rubbish. Our life is uncertain, just return or cpf sa retirement fund. Stop making all this rubbish law of cpf, 1 after another. Let us see our own hardwork money.

    ReplyDelete

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