facebookShould I pay my Mortgage in full CPF or mixture of CPF & cash? - Seedly

Anonymous

04 Dec 2019

Property

Should I pay my Mortgage in full CPF or mixture of CPF & cash?

Some say to pay Mortgage with full CPF, yet some say pay your Mortgage partly CPF and Cash.
Why are there 2 different mentalities? Does anyone know?

Discussion (3)

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Loh Tat Tian

23 Sep 2019

Founder at PolicyWoke (We Buy Insurance Policies)

There are various answers already available.
MY off the hand idea is,
IF you can get a better investment return from CPF 2.5%, you will use CPF to pay for it.

If you can't get better investment reutnr from CPF 2.5%, you will use cash to pay for it.
https://seedly.sg/questions/pay-off-home-with-c...
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It depends on your outlook towards CPF: how do you view it?

If you are disgruntled with the system and have no confidence in the increasing minimum sum, as well as the constant raising of withdrawal age, then one would use CPF to pay off the loans. However, do be aware that on top of mortgage interest, any sum withdrawn for housing would have accrued interest. Essentially, whoever that used their CPF for housing would penalized with a double whammy - you will be paying interest twice: 2.6% to HDB, and 2.5% to yourself. In other words, you will be forgoing a the CPF OA's higher-yielding instrument in favour of servicing a lower cost of debt. This was the situation that many Singaporeans found themselves in as they speculated on the housing market, which resulted in them being "asset-rich, cash-poor"!

If you choose to use cash only, you will face liquidity risk ie too little cash flow and maybe overwhelmed by emergency events eg sudden loss of job/hospitalisation. As such, the better option would be to use a mix of both CPF and cash.

The best way to approach such a decision is to think of it this way - if you use CPF to pay your monthly instalments, would you be disciplined enough to diligently set aside the extra cash-on-hand and earn a return equivalent to or higher than CPF OA (2.5% - 3.5%)? If yes, then go ahead and pay your mortgage off with CPF. If not, then stick to cash and allow the CPF monies to accumulate a risk-free return of 2.5%.

You can see a more elaborated answer here: https://seedly.sg/questions/is-it-possible-to-p...

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