This is a stupid question... I'm trying to get a mortgage and quickly bump up my credit score a few points. Does it count as a strike against you if you pull a copy of your own credit report? I know when you apply for credit cards and such and they pull your report, your score goes down. I'm just trying to be so careful right now. Also, a mortgage rep said several mortgage companies pull my credit w/i 30 days that it would only count as 1 pull. Is this correct? I'm at a 661 and have a few less than 30 days past due payments. I have one mortgage that is completely fine. I have 3 credit cards all under 50 prcnt of the credit limit. Although I closed one of those cards so I was going to see if they can still report my credit limit. RIght now I'm not getting any positive credit for that. Any suggestions? Any pointers would be MUCH appreciated!!! Oh, does anyone know of a good mortgage company that deals with self employed clients? I need to state my income and most large banks and companies require a 680 to state income. Thanks SO SO SO much!!!
Pulling your own credit will not count against your score. Pulls for a mortgage within 30-45 days most of the time pulls will be looked at as one for your score. If you have any negs. on your cr than dispute them you never know it might up your score.
The quickest way to bump up your score, albeit temporarily, is to dispute some stuff in your profile with the CRAs. Pick two or three things that are fairly recent, like chargeoffs, derogatorys, late pays. Things older than 2-3 years won't have much of an effect. Just beware that they're likely to return within a few weeks. So be prepared to document something to the mortage companies to "explain" them. It helps that you can show a dispute letter to them. They will pull your credit again just before closing, from what I've heard. The funny thing is that most of these guys will swear that it takes at least 30 days for any changes to show up in your credit report! Untrue! Use it to your advantage. Closing credit accounts is ill-advised as it reduces your overall credit availability. Whomever perpetrates this myth should be shot! See if you can get an increase on your other credit lines. It's supposedly best to have 20-30% utilization -- that's outstanding credit usage divided by total available credit. You might also try to "piggyback" on somebody's card -- find someone with a better credit score and ask them to add you to one of their credit cards. Tell them to use your name and SSN (they MUST use a card that requires the reporting of an SSN) and to use their OWN address and contact info. The card gets mailed to them. They'll need to activate it, but then simply cut it up or shred it. That's it. They can have you removed from the account in about 60 days. From my experience, most people are worried you're going to somehow "sneak in" and use the account, leaving them with a bunch of debt they don't know about; that's fairly difficult to do these days. The greater risk is that they'll commit identity theft against YOU. But the likelihood of either is quite small, IMO. HTH
Thanks so much for all the feedback... Very good ideas and all things I've been pondering over. I've been thinking of asking for higher credit limits, bu then again, I don't want the ding on my report of the credit cards. So it's a catch 22. What should I do?
A "soft pull" does not count against your credit score, and is not seen by anyone who pulls your credit report for review. However, a credit line increase request often results in a "hard pull", so ask before you make the official request. As for the net effect on your credit score, if you succeed in getting the higher CL, your improved "utilization rate" will probably outweigh the negative effect of a hard inquiry. So, if you are certain you can get the CL increase, you will improve your overall score. But...if you do not get the increase, you will lose some score points.
See, that's what's interesting about the online monitoring program. I have not noticed that credit inquiries affect my score at all. In fact, it doesn't even seem to count them properly. Either way, when I have noticed, they don't count for much unless you have a bunch from very different sources in the same month. When I was buying a car last fall, there were several inquiries. Some identified themselves as car dealers, others were just being shopped around. Probably ten hits in total, between them and banks and credit unions. They were all related, but not all were obviously for the car. I didn't notice any hit on my score. This is one of those things that might really depend on your individual profile more than anything else.
You got lucky with the scoring model, and how they "count" shopping inquiries. Most likely they counted all of them as "1" inquiry for auto shopping. Perhaps this adds a little insight to "shop" ALL of your credit needs at the same time!
It probably depends on the type of inquiry. A bunch of credit card inquiries might "look" different to the scoring algos than a bunch of banks, credit unions and car dealers.
New inqueries on your report account for 10% of the FICO scoring model. The inqueries must be Hard not Soft. If you pull the inquery yourself it has no effect.
