To be able to see the results of a 
Scenario you need to “process” it by clicking on the 
button on the Scenarios page.
Once you queue the Scenario to process, you need to wait for the server to pick up your Scenario and actually complete the processing of it.
When it is your turn, a typical Scenario with approximtely 2 
Accounts, 10 
Properties, 6 
Rules and 2 
Goals covering about 480 months (40 years) will take about 5 minutes to run. More Accounts, Properties, Rules, Goals or months mean more time to process.
So, if there are 12 Scenarios from other users in front of you waiting to run as well, it can take about an hour before your Scenario will begin to process.
Why Does It Take So Long?
When the Real Estate Financial Planner™ software runs your Scenario it needs to do the following for each month that you run it for:
- Calculate the returns on each of the Accounts you have.
- Make payments on each of your mortgages on each of your Properties.
- Calculate all income and expenses for each Property for each month and create a ledger of each transaction for your review.
- Determine how much each of your Properties went up or down in value for each month.
- Determine how much rent on your Properties went up or down each month and update that each year when you get a new tenant.
- Calculate your property taxes, insurance, maintenance, property management, capital expenses, depreciation and much more for each Property for each month.
- Deposit your paycheck after taxes and pay your personal expenses as you define them using Rules for each month.
- Determine what inflation is for each month and calculate what a dollar in the future is worth in today’s dollars so we can present inflation adjusted values or raw values.
- Calculate mandatory withdrawals from retirement accounts.
- Check to see if you have enough down payment to buy another Property if you have set up a Rule to do that.
- See if you can do a cash out refinance on any Properties and use that money to buy another Property or deposit the money into an invesment Account.
- And much, much more…
And the Real Estate Financial Planner™ can’t do more than one month at a time because we need to know the results of the previous month to be able to know Account balances, Property income and expenses and to run Rules based on what happened the month before.
All told, for a Scenario with just 2 Accounts, 10 Properties and half a dozen Rules the Real Estate Financial Planner™ software is doing well over a million calculations and storing about 125,000 variables that can be viewed as charts and ledgers.
The Real Estate Financial Planner™ software does about 3,000 calculations and saves about 416 variables to the database for you every second while it is taking the 5 minutes or so to process your Scenario. Sometimes, a little faster… and sometimes a little slower.
If you’re running just 100 
Monte Carlo runs, that’s easily 12.5 million data points. If you’re running 1,000 Monte Carlo runs, that’s 125 million data points to evaluate your investing strategy. This is non-trivial processing of your “stuff”.
The more complex your Scenario is, the longer it will take to run (and the longer others will need to wait to be able to run their Scenarios).
Adding more Accounts, Properties, Rules or Goals will increase the amount of time it takes for the Real Estate Financial Planner™ software to complete processing your Scenario. The more months you want to see your results for, the longer it will take to run. Adding more Accounts, Properties, Rules or Goals does not increase your time linearly; it can increase the time it takes to process exponentially.
So, be reasonable and relax your expectations. Read some of this website or watch a class while you wait.
How To Speed It Up
The following are some suggestions for how to make the Real Estate Financial Planner™ software faster for you:
- When testing, test for fewer months first to make sure it is set up the way you think and giving you the expected results first. Then, you can always have it run a full 480 months once it is setup properly.
Premium members get moved to the front of the processing queue.- There are fewer people running Scenarios at odd hours (like really early in the morning), so it may be faster at that time.
- Consider using fewer Accounts, Properties, Rules or Goals until you know exactly what you want to test.
- Speak encouraging words at your computer to make it feel better and work faster.
Scenarios
If you’d like to learn more about Scenarios, check out these additional resources.