Professional advice is indeed different..

Met up with a property agent friend. Managed to learn a couple of tricks from him:


(1) In order not to let HDB wipe out all our cpf; set aside a sum money from the ordinary account and invest it in some investment account before closing the deal. After the deal is closed, then we can close the investment account and replace the money back into the ordinary account.

He said that the thinking of paying off as much money as possible so that we need not take up so much loan is out-dated. Haha...Why?

- Interest rate for cpf would be 3.5% for the first $20 000 from Jan 08 onwards. This is higher than the interest rate for HDB loan at 2.6%. Meaning, keeping the money in the cpf would be more profitable than using it all at once to finance the flat.

- The money left in cpf will come in handy in the event that either husband or wife is unable to contribute to the cpf for a few months for some reason or other. Yeah I know some people can manage the monthly instalment with just one person's cpf, but still it is better to be on the safe side.

(2) Inflation is an important consideration.

(3) Close the deal then get another valuation of the flat. This time the flat would definately be higher in valuation, hence the amount of cash we will need to fork out upfront would be lesser!!

Hmmm..that was as much as I could remember for the time being.

Getting an agent is good, for no matter how much we read up and how learned we think we are about properties, we can never match up to professionals who have been in the field for many years. At least I believe that we can never think on the spot as fast and precise as they can.