Personal tax planning 1: Tax reliefs

Welcome to my basic personal income tax planning series! In this series of posts I hope to cover the following topics:

1. Tax reliefs
2. CPF Cash Top Up
3. Supplementary Retirement Scheme
4. Bringing it all together – How to best utilise these reliefs to your advantage

This series of posts assumes that you understand the basic concepts of income tax and personal reliefs as well as the filing requirements. If you are new to income tax, I recommend that you go through the information on the IRAS website which provides a basic overview of things.

Know your personal reliefs

I’ve come across some friends that doesn’t even bother to fire up the IRAS myTax Portal every year to at least take a look at their tax filing, let alone adjust their filings. To that I say thank you for your outsized contribution to nation building! ?

Let’s be clear, tax planning is not tax evasion. It’s about efficiency and paying your fair share. And knowing your reliefs is a large part of that. IRAS has done up a pretty nifty relief eligibility tool, I encourage you to play around with it and learn more about the various reliefs available. Who knows, maybe you could save some taxes in the process.

The reliefs I’ll be covering are those that require action on your part to qualify for (be it to proactively elect to claim the relief or perform the requirements), as if you do not even know the relief exists, you might not act in the first place. Generally I’ll be classifying them into 2 categories – family support and retirement / career support.

Family support reliefs

Generally this class of reliefs reflects the Government’s attempt to incentivise working Singaporeans to help support their family members in their old age or handicapped condition, or to have more children. This class of reliefs require you to elect to claim this relief in your annual tax filing and are more binary in nature (ie either you qualify or you don’t), resulting in limited tax planning opportunities.

Here is a summary of the available reliefs:

1 – Depends on whether the dependent stays with you
2 – Depends on whether the dependent is handicapped

Here are some infographics provided by IRAS for sharing with you guys:

Generally if you are supporting a child, parent, grandparent, in-law, grandparent-in-law or spouse, you probably qualify. These reliefs generally have conditions like whether the dependent stays with you, or if you have incurred $2,000 in the YA to support these dependents who don’t stay with you, or if they have <$4,000 income in the past year. Some of the reliefs can be shared with your siblings or spouse so there’s some planning you need to discuss with your siblings / spouse. For more information on the conditions, I refer you to the relief eligibility tool from IRAS linked above.

The great thing about these reliefs is that once you claim it in one year, IRAS automatically applies it to your subsequent years’ tax filings. So going forward if nothing changes, you do not need to adjust your reliefs again.

I will talk a bit more about how to best utilise these reliefs in the last post of this series.

Retirement / Career support reliefs

This class of reliefs are the Government’s way to incentivise Singaporeans to upgrade yourself and take charge of your retirement. These reliefs require you to proactively do something to qualify for the relief. As a result, these reliefs have greater flexibility for tax planning purposes.

There are 3 reliefs I will cover in this section:

1. Course fee relief
2. CPF Cash Top-up relief / CPF relief
3. Supplementary Retirement Scheme relief

Course fee relief

This relief allows you to claim up to $5,500 per year in tax reliefs for courses you have taken that will lead to a professional / vocational qualification or are relevant to your current or new employment. This does not cover courses you take for fun (RIP cooking courses) or general skills (RIP Microsoft Office courses). You can also choose to defer the claims up to 2 years (the earlier of 2 years or the year you have an assessable income >$22,000) if your assessable income is less than $22,000 in the year you incur the costs.

Pretty straight forward relief, nothing much to add. Just remember this relief when you go for professional courses and keep the invoices or records for this relief when you claim it, in case IRAS audits you.

CPF Cash Top-up / CPF Relief

There are 2 ways you can voluntarily top up your CPF account to get tax reliefs:

1. Top up your / family member’s Special Account / Retirement Account

You can voluntarily top up your own or your family’s Special Account (if you are under 55) or Retirement Account (if you are over 55) and get a dollar for dollar tax relief of up to $14,000 per year ($7,000 for your own accounts, $7,000 for your family members’).

2. Top up your Medisave Account

You can voluntarily top up your Medisave Account and get a dollar for dollar tax relief.

The CPF Board will automatically notify IRAS of the voluntary contributions you have made to the respective accounts. Do note that there are caps on topping up your Special / Retirement / Medisave Account, which I will cover in greater detail in my next post.

Supplementary Retirement Scheme Relief

Supplementary Retirement Scheme (SRS) is a voluntary scheme that the Government hopes to encourage Singaporeans to save over and beyond the CPF for retirement. It is a account you can open with any of the 3 local banks and contributions are given a dollar for dollar tax relief. The funds deposited can be used for investment purposes. Do note that there is a annual contribution cap of $15,300 per year.

SRS relief is automatically credited to you annually as your bank will notify IRAS of your annual contributions. I will cover this scheme and its key considerations before you contribute in greater depth in my 3rd post of this series.

Summary

Knowing your reliefs is important if you wish to perform some tax planning to mitigate your annual tax liability. I’ve given you a brief overview of the various reliefs that are not automatically claimed. For more in-depth explanations on the qualifying criteria, you can visit the IRAS website.

Till my next post on the CPF Cash Top-up Relief.

Happy Hunting,
KK