Monday, January 23, 2023

Should I (Really) Invest My CPF? (Part 2)

Part 1 is here for those who have yet to read it. In this part (Part 2), I will share my personal circumstances and decisions while investing my CPF.

 

A Brief History

 

There are two stages in my CPF investment journey: the first one would be around the early to late 2000s period, and the second was the current stage which started sometime in 2017. 

 

The first stage was rather bland and naïve to say the least; I was aware of this thing called CPF where 20% of my pay (and another substantial percentage portion from my employer) would go to this account where I can pay for my home loan. A meeting with a financial advisor opened my eyes on the possibility of investing my CPF (through the advisor’s funds, of course), and very soon I had invested both my Ordinary Account (OA) and Special Account (SA) (during that time the choice of funds for SA was more extensive). Among three funds or so, I could only recall the sector of one fund, which was purely in global technology. I read up the factsheet and saw it went down sharply from a high, which on hindsight was due to being pummeled by the dotcom bust. In the end, I sold off all holdings during the latter part of 2000s with some profit.

 

Fast forward to 2016, two milestones that year led me to the rediscovery and reopening of investing my CPF OA. The first one was the complete payment of our property mortgage via CPF, and the second was the achievement of the then prevailing full retirement sum (FRS) in my SA alone. 

 

The Grand Plan

 

With these checkpoints reached, the next step of my strategy was to invest my OA both by active picking of dividend-generating counters and dollar cost averaging via buying into funds (I will share more on these in the next section) to maximize my gains and returns, once it had enough allowed for investing (we had employed early capital repayment to finish the mortgage ASAP, hence the huge drawdown). As I am still employed in a full-time job, cash is continually flowing into my OA and SA, and this meant I had enough bullets to fund my investments using OA, and in SA making use of compounding to widen the gap between what I would get eventually at age 55 and the FRS amount by then, which the figure is not out yet on the CPF website.

 

Bear in mind that CPF forms part of my grand plan of things which would also involve our other portfolio universes, in our so-called portfolio multiverse: the portfolios each bought using disposable income and the supplementary retirement scheme (SRS), and the potentiality of generating rental income in the future. Regarding CPF, since withdrawal is allowed after age 55, several choices could stem from here:

 

Choice #

Withdraw Cash Above FRS*

Withdraw Investments From CPF**

Annual Withdrawal Of CPF Interest***

1

Full

Full

NA

2

Full

Partial

NA

3

Partial

Full

Yes

4

Partial

Partial

Yes

5

NA

Full

Yes

6

NA

Partial

Yes

7

NA

NA

Yes

8

Liquidate CPF investments and full withdrawal above FRS

9

Liquidate CPF investments and partial withdrawal above FRS

Yes

10

Liquidate CPF investments and no withdrawal from CPF

Yes

 

*Withdrawal of cash to augment disposable income portfolio

**Withdrawal of CPF investments to augment disposable income portfolio

***For augmenting disposable income portfolio or as part of passive income in the event of early retirement

 

The choice would very much depend on the following variables:

 

·      The financial status as at age 55

·      The state of employment as at age 55

·      The performances of the respective portfolios as at age 55

 

Clarifying further, the first point of financial status is whether we could had achieved full or partial financial independence. The second point touches on whether I am still having my full-time job or moving into a downgraded employment status, i.e., stepping down to a lesser paid (and with lesser responsibility) role. The third is how the portfolios perform as at the point of time, which is why I am implementing time diversification in my CPF investments (see here for the post on diversifying time).

 

Operationalizing

 

With planning and strategy being determined, the next step is to operationalize them. Up till recently with all the hype on rising interest rates, cash had been a low yielding asset class in the conventional sense, but in CPF it is worth to hold it due to the higher than usual rates. Therefore, we are alright with having a huge reserve of cash even in the OA, and the minimally 2.5% can be seen as the risk-free rate to be used in comparison with other instruments.

 

With the above in mind, and considering the limits imposed on the amount that can be used (i.e., the 35% stock limit, professionally managed products, etc.), I had so far implemented buying dividend counters within the 35% stock limit, and funds through the professionally managed products (PMPs) route (I am currently putting on hold using the 10% gold limit). 

 

For dividend counters, on top of them being stable companies, the prevalent yield must be at least 4% or higher to make it palatable for me to overcome the risk premium. I would keep the number of counters to maximally five, as there are quarterly charges being imposed by the banks on keeping the securities on your behalf (for mine using UOB, it is SGD 2 per counter per quarter, before GST). Since five is the cap (which I had not hit yet), I would do a periodic review (around half-yearly) of the counters and see if I could average up/down if the fundamentals are still good, or exit it if the fundamentals are getting bad and start to select/prospect for the next one.

 

For PMPs, I am using Endowus as it allows me the flexibility to invest my OA in a portfolio style on foreign markets more directly and carry out automatic rebalancing (a.k.a. roboinvesting). While for PMPs it is difficult to gauge the returns and yields, using historical data (though I would also like to emphasize that past performances are not indicative of future results, but I need to base on something in my assumptions), the S&P 500 had an annualized return of 12.44% for the past 10 years and 10.24% for the past 50 years1. To add, the world (using MSCI World) returned an annualized 9.44% for the past 10 years and 7.85% since 31 Dec 19872. These numbers easily beat the 2.5%, albeit with volatility built in.

 

Conclusion

 

As described in Part 1, each one of us is different in our views and approaches to investing using CPF funds. Here I am sharing my case, but please do not follow blindly without first giving due consideration to yours. However, I do hope my post gives you additional knowledge and maybe introduce a new facet of looking at your CPF.

 

Disclaimer

 

1 – Aswath Damodaran, New York School of Business. Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds and Bills: 1928 – 2022. https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html (accessed 22 Jan 2023)

 

2 – Index Factsheet. MSCI World Index (USD). MSCI. 30 Dec 2022. https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/178e6643-6ae6-47b9-82be-e1fc565ededb (accessed 22 Jan 2023)

8 comments:

  1. Hi,

    Just some comments after reading your post.

    1. Why you are alright with the huge cash reserve for CPF OA, since it only pays you 2.5%pa? Yes, it is risk-free but even our STI ETF beats this return in the long term. Unless you have near term needs for using your CPF OA, you should always keep it invested. Otherwise, you can transfer to CPF SA for higher risk-free return.

    2. I disagree with your view of keeping a minimum number of stock counters for CPF OA investments, just to save on quarterly agent bank fees. As long as the dividends received from those counters is able to offset these fees, you should not have a limit on the number of stocks. In fact, you are increasing the risk of your CPF stock portfolio with such a small number and you have to get almost all your counters right. Otherwise, you have to spend more time having to switch around to maintain maximum 5 stocks which leads to more charges.

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    1. Hi ghchua,

      Thank you for your comments.

      I understand fully on your viewpoint to maximize investing the available CPF funds. For myself, being an advocate of diversification, I believe in having cash as an asset class in a portfolio, which also serves as "bullets" for investing and a "storage" for profits/dividends received, on top of getting the 2.5%.

      That being said, over the years I had slowly deployed my CPF OA funds, and currently the monthly DCAs to my PMPs are net negative of my regular monthly OA contributions. As my strategy to carry out time diversification, I am implementing a staggered entry into the PMPs with different portfolio/fund mix, and this would bring down my cash component inside the CPF even more.

      As for my "5-counters", it is a little rule set for our investment methodology. I may have sounded a little penny-wise-pound-foolish on the charges and may have gone against my diversification ethos, but I am giving this 35% limit portion primarily to good dividend-generating counters. Also, I am roping in my spouse's CPF OA, thus we have a total of 10 counter "choices", and we could average up/down as long as their fundamentals are sound (and initially so).

      Lastly, our CPF portfolio is part of the holistic "portfolio multiverse" which includes our disposable income and SRS portfolios, so the counters within them contribute to the overall well-being of our retirement funds.

      Cheers!

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    2. I am totally with you on the keep as few counters as possible (and no penny stocks) in CPFIS given the ridiculous quarterly charges plus the service charge is calculate per 1000 shares. Not to mention charges if there are corporate actions like rights issue etc. CPFIS seems to be an ideal place to hold most of my STI ETF (1 counter), and FSMOne unit trust portfolio (considered 1 counter). Nice to see ghchua is still around, I remember his blog and posts since the time sgfunds.com was still around.

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    3. Hello World,

      Thanks for agreeing and your views.

      On an additional note stemming from penny counters in CPFIS, it reiterated my stand on having good quality counters and funds that exhibited good dividend payouts and/or stable growth that go above the 2.5% risk-free rate.

      And on sgfunds.com, that's really nostalgic...:)

      Cheers!

      Delete
  2. We can treat 2.5% CPFOA as part of our bond allocation and CPFIS as our war chest of last resort after depleting our cash deployment in Singapore market. Using Barbell investing strategy for CPFIS across market cycles. We need to find our own investing strategy through our performance across each market cycle and then fine tuning for next market cycle.

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    1. Hi CreateWealth8888,

      Thanks for your comments and viewpoints. Interesting to learn about using barbell (which I assume to be a balance between safe/almost risk-free and higher risk investments) and experiential learning to better investment strategies across time.

      Cheers!

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  3. Hi Bedokian,

    Thanks for sharing your financial plan. Its always better to have a plan than none. And I feel everyone should have one.

    Regarding the CPF savings, I am quite opposite in thinking with that of ghchua. My wife and I are ok with keeping our CPF savings full. Ok, lately we did move some of our OA money into T-bills because of the elevated yields. Combined, we have accumulated almost $3.5M in our CPF savings. From which we have invested $1.3M of our OA savings into T-bills for yields of 4% to 4.4%.

    At our age, wealth preservation is more important than growing it. Another factor in our consideration of keeping our CPF savings full is that we are already quite exposed to equities and property. Both of which are giving us nice passive income of $88K and $39.5K respectively in 2022.

    Peace of mind and good health are just as important too, if not more important as you cannot enjoy your wealth without them.

    All the best!

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    1. Hi mysecretinvestment,

      Thanks for your comments and views. Agreed that everyone have their own strategies and thoughts on investing and applying it with CPF. Good to learn from your case that your CPF is like a huge cash reserve with equities/properties forming your disposable income portfolio.

      Cheers!

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