RATE Formula #NUM Error

gsarpkaya  wrote:  `` I enabled iterative calculations.``

First, do not enable iterative calculations.  You might have read instructions to do that, even in MSFT documentation.  It is wrong!

You are correct that sometimes, a #NUM error can indicate that RATE needs some help by way of a "guess".  But zero is an unlikely choice, in this case.

(Did you really try a "guess" of 0%?!  Or did you enter RATE(44, 0, -1650, 15000000, 0)?  If the latter, zero is the "type", not the "guess".  In the future, post your formulas exactly as you enter them.)

I suspect you are mistyping the FV:  15000000 is 15,000,000 -- from 1650 to 15 million in just 44 periods?!

But it is not infeasible.  Since pmt=0, we can calculate the exact growth (interest?) rate as follows:

=(15000000/1650)^(1/44) -1

The result is 23.0179110523521%.

To confirm, note that with the above formula in A2, 1650*(1+A2)^44 displays 15000000.

Of course, we cannot be expected to know 23%.  But we might try 15%, then 20%.  And in fact:

=RATE(44, 0, -1650, 15000000, 0, 20%)

returns 23.0179110523521%.