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CPF investing made easy

Kelvin Tan Published on Mon, Sep 05, 2016 / 3:10 PM GMT+8

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The proposed Lifetime Retirement Investment Scheme is a simple, low-cost alternative for Central Provident Fund members to grow their savings. But will it cause unit trust funds offered under CPFIS to lose their relevance?

After years of getting burnt by volatile markets, Central Provident Fund investors are finally being offered a simple and cost effective national investment scheme. The aim is to solve the investment woes of CPF members, who have persistently earned meagre returns under the CPF Investment Scheme (CPFIS), which levies lofty transactional fees.

On Aug 3, the CPF Advisory Panel — set up by the Ministry of Manpower in September 2014 to study ways to improve the CPF system — recommended that the government roll out an alternative investment scheme called the Lifetime Retirement Investment Scheme (LRIS) for CPF members who wished to earn higher expected returns by taking on some investment risk through a small number of well diversified, passively managed, low-fee, no-load funds.