Recently, a relative of mine approached me for advice on his CPF Retirement Account (‘RA’). He is in a privileged position as he had the Full Retirement Sum (‘FRS’) transferred to his RA when he turned 55. He is now exploring the option of topping up his RA to the maximum allowable limit of Enhanced Retirement Sum (‘ERS’), being $279,000 in Year 2021. However, he is confused whether it is better to use cash or CPF to top up to his RA to reach ERS and receive higher CPF LIFE payouts in the future. For those on the CPF LIFE scheme and with sufficient retirement funds, this is not a simple problem to grapple with, albeit a happy one. Therefore, I thought it might be useful to flesh out this conundrum with more details in a blog post. Finally, given his circumstances, I eventually “advised” him to use cash to top up his RA to ERS based on a decision tree framework that I developed....