ok i just went onto true credits web site and they are telling my that my trans score is a lousy 571!!! i do not understand, i have 1 collection on there from 99 for 52.00 for a medical bill. they said my score is so low because i have tons of inquirys and my cards are carrying balances toward there limits is this really fair?? i have never been late or missed a payment on any!!! of my credit card bills and have paid off 5 cars!!! how can i get rid of those inquirys and will it make a big difference i have about 37 in the last twelve months
Each INQUIRY can take up to 10 points or more... The higher your credit utilization, the exponential the point loss. The reasons... A lot of inquiries, they presume you may have run into financial problems, and you are looking for MORE than one account of the same type to make ends meet (instead of just shopping around). Heavy Utilization, if you do get into a crunch, you may be over-extending yourself. From what I've seen, the closer that your utilization is to being in the range of 20-50%, the better your scores will like it. Believe it or not, it may not take much of a payment to bring the utilization to what would be needed to have a dramatic effect. Even one negative trade line can take a *LOT* of points away. This is sometimes referred to as the last negative BUMP because as soon as that is bumped off, they see a dramatic score increase.
One way to try to get rid of the inquiries, is to ask the company which pulled the inquiry, if they would consider 'soft'ening the inquiry. Depending on how forceful you get, and/or how far up the chain of command you get, you may have some success in getting some of them softened. The first inquiry tends to have the biggest score effect, each one after that has a slightly less effect. 30+ inquiries is *WAY* in excess, though. I would start with the newest of the inquiries, and work your way back through to the last 6 months, to see how much of an effect that has on your scores.
so wow i really!! did not realize that the inquirys were killing my score so guess i will start but what does soften mean?? and how do i go about it
There are three types of inquiries... HARD - the ones that count against you. SOFT - the ones that a bank may pull regularly when you have an account with them to decide if you may qualify for a CLI. PRM / LIMITED - the ones which result in the junk mail filled with pre-approved offers. Hard inquiries are the only ones which are shown to others when they pull your report; so these are the only ones considered by the scoring systems. So, when a company 'softens' the inquiry, they basically tell the CRA, 'We wanted to pull their report as a SOFT inquiry. Would you be able to make our inquiry soft? Thanks.' Basically, when I was looking at my report 'before/after' doing an application, the first inquiry, had an about a 10 point drop, the next one had about a 5 or so point drop. How many points each inquiries will have also depends on what else is in your credit file, but if you think in terms of each application I complete, could be costing me 10 FICO points, you may be able to help prevent running up so many inquiries in the future. When you get a new account, and don't use it to the limit, you can typically get those points back and maybe even more. If all else fails, you could always try to dispute the inquiry, some may be 'deletable' through dispute. You used to be able to bump inquiries off by pulling your own report freqently, but the last few TU reports I've gotten have listed about 3-4 pages of PrivacyGuard pulls, so it looks like the days of bumpage may be harder to achieve.
