Apart from ensuring retirement adequacy for Singaporeans, CPF can also be used for other essential needs. This includes housing and other eligible needs like healthcare, insurance payments, investments, and education loans.
Students or prospective students can apply to use CPF savings to pay for their education with the CPF Education Loan Scheme. This scheme is only for approved full-time courses for undergraduates and polytechnic students. Interested applicants should check the application dates on the CPF website for their respective institutions.
If you would need a refresher on the eligibility and limits of CPF Educational Loan Scheme, do check out our article – Complete Guide To Using Your CPF To Pay For University and Polytechnic.
For this application, the student is the key applicant here. For most, this would be your first time logging in to CPF and applying for a loan. Thankfully, the application process is relatively short and simple which can be completed in five minutes.
Before starting, you need to have your guardian/parents and your own SingPass sign-in and IC details ready. So, set up your SingPass if you haven’t done so.
Read More: Here’s What You Need To Know About The Newly-Announced Suspension Of Student Loan Repayments
#1 Go To My Requests After Logging In To MyCPF With Your SingPass
Log in to your CPF account on the CPF website, with your SingPass.
After logging in to your CPF account, proceed to apply for the CPF Education Loan Scheme under the “Education/Dependant’s Education” tab.
As mentioned earlier, the key applicant would have to be the student and the repayment would have to be paid in cash (not with CPF contributions) in the future by the student.
After acknowledging the Terms & Conditions, we can start filling in the details for the application.
#2 Fill In Your Education Institution Details
In total, there are four simple steps that we would need to complete the application. After confirming your residency status, we can proceed with the first step of filling in your education institution details.
Here, we can select our educational institution from the dropdown list of universities and polytechnics. Existing students can also apply for CPF Education Loan Scheme. Proceed to the next step after filling in the details.
#3 Choosing The CPF Account To Pay For Education Loan
For step 2, we would need to choose which CPF account to finance the CPF education loan. Aside from using our own, parents or spouse’s CPF savings, we can also use our relatives or legal guardian’s CPF savings, subject to CPF’s approval.
In the case of using our sibling’s, relative’s or legal guardian’s CPF monies, we have to submit documents for consideration and proof of relationship. This includes a signed copy of the letter of appeal, birth certificates (student and relative/guardian) and other relevant legal documents. These documents can be attached at the last step of the application.
Upon deciding which CPF account to use for the education loan, we should fill in the necessary information or we can use SingPass to retrieve the relevant CPF member information.
Depending on the amount of CPF savings available for the loan, we should select the appropriate percentage of tuition fees to borrow. The dropdown list of percentages ranges from 100% to 5%.
#4 Confirm Details And Upload Required Documents For CPF Review
In the final step, do check through your application details. Once again, the CPF Education Loan Scheme is a loan. The repayment would have to be paid back in cash (not CPF contributions from any party).
After checking through, we should upload our required documents. The accepted file formats are pdf, jpeg and jpg.
Once we have the required documents, we can submit the application to CPF board for their review.
At the acknowledgement page, we can expect to wait about 2 working days to receive the final approval of our CPF education loan status.
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