The Sale Proceeds Calculator, Explained

"We sold for $300k more than we paid" and "we walked away with $300k" are two completely different statements, and confusing them is how upgraders end up short of cash at the worst moment. The Sale Proceeds Calculator exists to keep them apart. It takes your sale price and strips out everything that has to be paid first — the outstanding loan, the CPF you must refund to your own OA, the agent's commission and GST, the legal fees — and shows you two clean figures: the cash that lands in your bank account, and the total proceeds including the CPF returned to your retirement savings.

The deduction stack, in order

The calculator works the way a conveyancing lawyer's statement does — top line down to cash:

Start with the sale price. Subtract the outstanding loan the bank redeems on completion. Subtract the agent commission (default 2% of the price) and the 9% GST charged on top of it. Subtract legal fees (around $3,000 for a standard conveyance) and any miscellaneous items — an HDB resale application fee, a bank redemption penalty if you're still in lock-in. Then subtract the big one: the CPF refund.

What's left is your net cash proceeds — the money that actually reaches your bank account. The CPF refund is then shown separately as money returning to your OA, and the two are added to give total proceeds (cash + CPF). Keeping them on separate lines is the whole point: the total can look healthy while the cash is thin.

The CPF refund is the figure that fools people

When you used CPF for your home, selling means refunding the amount you withdrew plus the accrued interest it would have earned — the 2.5% a year your OA would have compounded had the money stayed put. Over a long hold, that accrued interest can run into tens of thousands. That entire refund goes back into your CPF Ordinary Account, not your pocket. It's still your money and it's still working for you — but you can't spend it on renovations or a holiday, and if you're over 55 the rules on what you can withdraw differ again.

One important note on how the tool handles this: it does not estimate your accrued interest for you. You enter the exact "CPF used plus accrued interest" figure straight from your CPF statement — CPF Board → My Statement → Property withdrawals — for each owner. That's deliberate: the real number is sitting in your statement, and using it beats any estimate. The calculator takes co-owners separately, so a couple can split Seller A and Seller B.

What it does — and one thing it doesn't

The calculator flags the danger cases automatically: if the loan and CPF refund together exceed your sale price, you're in a negative-cash or even negative-equity position — you'd have to top up cash to complete, or top up your CPF shortfall — and it warns you rather than printing a cheerful number.

The one thing it deliberately leaves out is Seller's Stamp Duty. SSD only applies if you sell within the holding period (currently four years on a tiered scale), so it's a yes/no most sellers can check quickly, and folding it into every calculation would muddy the common case. If you're selling early, add it separately.

How to read it

Open the Sale Proceeds Calculator, enter your sale price, outstanding loan, the CPF refund from your statement, and adjust the commission and fees if yours differ from the defaults. Read the cash-in-hand figure first — that's what funds your next downpayment and the gap before your new place completes. Then read the total including CPF to understand your full position. The difference between those two numbers is the cash-flow trap that catches upgraders who budgeted off the headline gain.

Work out what you'll actually walk away with at tribesg.com/sale-proceeds.

Sources: TRIBE Sale Proceeds Calculator; computation and defaults (2% agent commission, 9% GST, ~$3,000 legal fees) as at June 2026. CPF refund and accrued-interest figures should be taken from your CPF statement. Informational only; not financial advice.

Silas Tan is a District Director at Huttons Asia and co-founder of TRIBE. This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial or investment advice. CEA Registration R000303I.