FantasyProsper.com - The Unofficial Prosper.com Lending Simulator

The first step to using the Fantasy Prosper website is to create an account. If you haven't already, you can click here to register now. Registration is quick and easy, and best of all it's completely free!

Once you have registered, you will be able to log in and view your account page. You'll see that a Fantasy Prosper Basic portfolio has been created for you with a starting balance of $2,000 for investing in loans on the Fantasy Prosper site. In addition, your account will be automatically credited with $200 every month on the monthly anniversary of your signup date.

Now that we have some money, let's start looking at some listings!

Clicking on the Listings tab will bring you to the Listing browser screen. The box at the top of the screen allows you some limited search functionality to narrow down the listings that will be shown and control the order they are shown in. The listings you see on this screen are the same listings that are currently posted on the real Prosper.com site.

Once you've found a listing that looks interesting, click on the title to be brought to the listing details screen. If you've spent any time on Prosper, you'll notice that this screen looks very similar, but there is at least one key difference - the extended credit data is missing! Since this information is only available to actual Prosper.com lenders, you'll have to have to use your Prosper.com lender account to view that information there. If you don't have a Prosper.com lender account, you'll have to make do without that information - Sorry, but there's nothing I can do about it.

If after reviewing the details the listing still looks good, you are now ready to place a bid!

To bid on a listing, simply click the "Bid Now" button on the Listing Detail screen of the listing you wish to bid on. You will be brought to the bidding screen where you will be shown how much money you have available for bidding in your Fantasy Prosper account. Just like on Prosper.com, you will enter the amount you wish to bid and choose the minimum interest rate you will accept for the listing. Also just like on Prosper.com, once your bid has been placed, it cannot be withdrawn. If a listing expires without funding on Prosper.com, or you are outbid, the amount you bid will be returned to your Fantasy Prosper account. As you can see, the bidding process on Fantasy Prosper is very similar to the process on the real Prosper.com site. There are a few key differences though.

First, it doesn't matter how many or how few people bid on the Fantasy Prosper listing. The listing will fund if and only if it actually funds on the real Prosper.com site. So, even if you are the only bidder on the Fantasy Prosper listing, it will still fund if it actually funds on Prosper.com.

Second, you can be outbid only if the listing funds on Prosper.com at a lower rate than the minimum rate you set when you bid. Also, you will not receive a notification when you are outbid, so make sure you carefully consider the minimum rate you are willing to accept when you place your bid.

Finally, there is no concept of a "partially winning" bid on Fantasy Prosper. All bids with a minimum rate at or below the final lender rate for the listing on Prosper.com will be considered winning bids. This may result in more dollars in total bids than the amount requested by the borrower. But that's ok because this is all just a simulation, right?

Now that we've covered bidding, I'll explain what happens after a listing has funded.

Once a listing has funded on Prosper, it sits in a sort of limbo state (Pending Origination) while the loan originates. Pretty much the same thing will happen on Fantasy Prosper. Once the listing has funded, the money you bid on it will sit idle until either the loan is originated on Prosper or it is cancelled and the money is returned to your account.

On rare occasions it may be possible that we are unable to automatically match up the listing you bid on with the loan that was created on Prosper.com. In these cases we will attempt to match them up manually by contacting lenders involved in the actual loan, or if that does not work, we will return the money bid on that listing to your account.

After a loan has been originated, you will (hopefully) start receiving payments. Payments on Fantasy Prosper work a bit differently than payments on the real Prosper.com site.

First, payments are not credited to your Fantasy Prosper account until 20 days after the payment is actually made. The reason for this is that if the payment was not actually made on the real Prosper.com site, it will take at least 15 days before the loan status changes to "Late" and we find out about it at Fantasy Prosper. The extra 5 days are there to account for weekends, holidays, and the 24-48 hour data delay.

Second, whenever a payment is made it is assumed that the payment is for exactly the amount due, no more and no less. Because we don't actually have the ability to know how much the payment was for, this is the best assumption we can make.

Finally, if a loan is late and a payment is made that brings it current (or less late), collection agency fees and late payment fees are not taken into account. Although it might be theoretically possible for us to do this, it was a feature we decided to leave out for now.

In order to make the simulation realistic, delinquencies and defaults must also be part of the equation. If a loan goes late or defaults on Prosper, the loan will go late or default on Fantasy Prosper as well. Once a loan goes late, monthly payments from that loan to your Fantasy Prosper account will cease until the loan is brought current. If a payment is made that does not bring the loan current but does change it's status positively (for example from 2 months late to 1 month late) those payments will be credited to your account as well.

In the event that a loan Defaults, an appropriate amount will be credited to your account to simulate what the loan would have fetched from the debt buyers. These amounts will be based on the actual previous debt sales by Prosper.com.