17 Nov 2025
SOURCE: CPF Board
Your retirement savings are important, and it’s vital that you make the right choices to grow them. Let’s take a look at some changes you can make to better grow your retirement savings.
Prioritising your needs over wants is a common advice when it comes to growing one’s savings. You cut down on the non-essential spending, leaving yourself with more savings. However, this does not mean forgoing your wants all the time. With the right approach, you can secure your financial future while still enjoying life in the present.
Your retirement savings can grow faster by topping up your CPF savings earlier and more frequently. With CPF's steady interest rates, your savings benefit from the compounding effect to grow exponentially over time.
If making a big top-up seems daunting, making smaller top-ups can still go a long way, provided you make them consistently and frequently. Having this discipline gives you greater assurance that even as you spend in the present, you also have a plan in place to build your retirement savings for the future.
Financial and retirement planning is more like a journey than a destination, with various life stages and expenses to consider.
Simply accumulating money without a clear plan is like trying to embark on this journey without a map. To aid you with crafting the plan that fits you best, Plan Life Ahead, Now! (PLAN) with CPF is a one-stop financial guidance platform that helps you identify your key financial planning areas and supports you in making informed financial decisions as you navigate through life.
After logging into your PLAN with CPF dashboard, you’ll be guided to consider financial planning areas to work on, tap on CPF planners for your retirement, housing and healthcare financing needs, and access resources on CPF and financial topics that have been curated for you. You can also answer a short questionnaire that provides tips to help strengthen your financial fitness beyond CPF. Learn how PLAN with CPF and the CPF planners make financial planning earlier for you.
Besides relying on top-ups and CPF interest rates, investments can potentially grow your retirement savings, especially if you have a longer time horizon or runway to invest. Before investing, it’s important to understand your risk appetite as all investments come with risks. You should consider your financial obligations, investment timeline, comfort level with market fluctuations and the maximum amount of money you’re willing to potentially lose.
You can grow your money with these safe investments in Singapore. If you prefer investments with higher returns, remember that it comes with higher risk of losing your investments. As a general rule of thumb, make sure you have enough emergency savings set aside for unforeseen circumstances first.
You can also consider investing your CPF savings under the CPF Investment Scheme (CPFIS), which lets you invest your Ordinary Account (OA) and Special Account (SA) savings to enhance your retirement savings. When investing with your CPF savings, it’s important to understand that the interest earned from your OA or SA savings will be affected when you make an investment using your CPF monies. As such, you will need to make sure that you select investment options with a high enough return (which might come with greater risks) to compensate for the difference in interest earned by your OA or SA savings.
Growing your retirement savings isn’t easy, and there’s always room for improvement in the ways you can use to do so. By changing some of your habits, you can better grow your retirement savings without needing to drastically cut your spending or look for risky options with quick returns.
Information in this article is accurate as at the date of publication.
