Invest 15% of your income, and 5% to Medisave.
You're protected and you're debt-free. Every dollar you earn is finally yours.
Now let’s put it to work.
Wow, isn't 15% a bit high?
Yes. Deliberately.
You are coming into this step with no debt payments and a full emergency fund behind you. That is exactly the moment to go harder than normal, not softer.
A bigger fund built in a shorter window, then left alone for longer - that's the whole game.
The early money is the money that compounds the longest, and waiting is the one thing that can't be made up for, later.
CPF is a floor. It was built as a floor.
CPF is doing real work for you, and it does it well.
It pays 2.5% on your Ordinary Account and 4% on your Special, MediSave and Retirement Accounts, plus an extra 1% on your first $60,000 of combined balances. For a government-guaranteed return, that is excellent.
Now look at what CPF alone delivers at the end. For someone turning 55 in 2026:
Basic Retirement Sum: $110,200 - roughly $950 a month from age 65
Full Retirement Sum: $220,400 - roughly $1,780 a month
Enhanced Retirement Sum: $440,800 - roughly $3,440 a month
Then put that next to what life here actually costs. The Department of Statistics puts average monthly household expenditure at $5,931 in its 2023 survey.
Even the Full Retirement Sum pays out less than a third of that.
This is not a criticism of CPF. It is the whole point of CPF - a floor you cannot fall through.
The 15% is how you build the part above it.
And the floor is getting firmer. MOM reports that the share of active CPF members setting aside their Basic Retirement Sum at 55 has gone from about 5 in 10 to more than 7 in 10 over the last decade, with around 8 in 10 projected by 2027.
More of us are clearing the floor. Very few of us are building above it.
And the 5% to Medisave?
That one is uniquely Singaporean, and it's ridiculously powerful.
Your MediSave is already being fed. A worker aged 35 and under has 21.62% of their total CPF contribution routed to MediSave - around 8% of salary before you add a cent.
Topping it up with 5% of your pay does 2 things:
It earns 4%.
Once MediSave reaches the Basic Healthcare Sum ($79,000 in 2026), the overflow spills into your other accounts.
The overflow is what you want.
Come retirement, that makes hitting your chosen retirement sum considerably easier. And it means a hospital bill stops being a threat to everything else you've built.
The millionaire part
This is the step where the first million actually gets built.
Not by picking well. By putting a serious percentage in, early, and then leaving it alone.
Trust the process, and the math will work itself out for you.