You will be able to identify each type of entry in your CPF transaction history and match it to its cause.
Hafiz is 31, a project engineer, and he and his wife bought an HDB flat in Punggol two years ago. He opened his CPF transaction history to check one thing, whether his bonus contribution had arrived, and found a long list of short codes, dates and amounts going in both directions. Some months had one entry. Others had four. One entry in January was larger than any contribution he'd ever had, and he couldn't work out where it came from.
A transaction history is a ledger, and every line in it has a cause. Once you know the four kinds of entry, you can read a year of it in a few minutes. This lesson goes through them using Hafiz's history, and you'll use the same four labels on your own.
To find it, log in to the CPF website or app with Singpass and open your transaction history. You can usually filter by date and by account. Choose a period, such as the last six or twelve months, and look at all accounts together first, because one event can touch more than one account.
Each entry has a date, a short code describing the type of transaction, and an amount for each account it affects. The CPF website explains what each code means. Keep that legend open the first time you read your history, rather than guessing from the letters.
Most of your entries will be contributions, one a month from each employer. Each contribution entry shows the amount, which employer paid it, and the month the wages were for.
That last detail is the one that confuses people. The wage month and the month the money arrives are often different. Employers usually pay CPF for one month's wages during the following month, so April's contribution normally arrives in May. If you check the history in late April and see nothing for April, that's usually just timing. Read the wage month on the entry, not the date it was credited.
Each contribution is then split across your accounts using the allocation rates for your age, as lesson 2.1 explained. So one contribution may appear as three amounts on one line, or as three lines, depending on how you view it.
A bonus attracts CPF as an additional wage, as you saw in lesson 1.4, Overtime, allowances, bonuses and unpaid leave on the slip. In the history it usually appears as its own entry, separate from that month's regular contribution and tagged to the month the bonus was paid.
Hafiz's bonus was paid with his March salary. In his history, the contribution for March wages arrived in April as two entries from the same employer: the usual monthly amount, and a second, larger one for the bonus. He had been looking for one bigger entry and missed it because it was split. The bonus contribution was there.
Money also leaves your CPF, and the history records each outflow. The common ones are:
housing: monthly instalments on a home loan paid from your Ordinary Account, which for Hafiz meant one entry every month insurance premiums: MediShield Life and other approved premiums paid from MediSave, and some schemes paid from the Ordinary Account investments: money moved out to buy approved investments, if you use CPF for investing
Each outflow should match something you set up or agreed to. Lesson 2.3, What moves money out of your CPF and why, goes through them one by one and shows you how to check them. For now, the job is only to recognise them as outflows and label them.
This is what Hafiz saw in January. CPF works out interest every month on your balances, but it doesn't pay it every month. It adds up the year's interest and credits it in one go, at the start of the following year.
So for eleven months, your history shows no interest at all, and then a single entry appears for each account around January. Because it's a whole year's interest, it can be bigger than a month's contribution. That's the large entry that puzzled Hafiz. It wasn't an error or a refund. It was last year's interest, all at once.
Don't try to check the interest figure to the cent. The calculation uses monthly balances, extra interest on part of your savings and current rates, all of which are on the CPF website. What's worth checking is that an interest entry appears for each account every January.
Here's how Hafiz read six months. He labelled each entry as a contribution, interest, a withdrawal or a deduction. He noted the wage month on each contribution. He found one contribution per month from his employer, plus the bonus entry in April. He found a housing withdrawal every month and one insurance premium in the period. And in January, three interest credits, one per account.
Nothing was missing, and every entry had a cause he could name. That's what a clean history looks like. Your own six months might show the same pattern, or a gap, a doubled month or a line you can't explain, and any of those is worth knowing about now. The activity gives you the four labels to sort them with.
Pick the last six months of your transaction history and label each entry as contribution, interest, withdrawal or deduction.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).