After I got rid of my NCO collection TL's I pulled my report and scores on TrueCredit. In the scores section, Truecredit says that one thing that's bringing down my scores is the number of inquiries on my reports. Unfortunately, over the past few months I have applied for a bit of credit... First, back in April/May I got a second mortgage on my house, before I realized that I would be transferred to FL. That put 3 inquiries on TU, 3 on EQ, and 4 on EX within a 30 day period. Next, my car died in June and I needed to get a new one. I applied for financing through the dealer, and apparently he sent my app to everyone and their uncle and I would up with 5 inquiries on TU, 5 on EQ, and 7 on EX within a 7 day period. Finally, I discovered that I'm being transferred and applied for a mortgage in FL at the beginning of this month, and that put another 2 on TU, 2 on EQ, and 3 on EX within a 15 day period. If all those inquiries are being counted, then clearly that's a whole lot within the past 4 months or so, but they can all be grouped into three seperate credit transactions, and it's my understanding that each transaction should only count as one inquiry. Is there any way to verify that the inquiries are being grouped this way? Can I have them remove all the inquires but one from each 'transaction'? Unfortunately I'm still in the process of applying for a mortgage, so time is of the essence here. I'm not sure I have 30 days to wait for a 'full' investigation. Can my mortgage broker do a rapid rescoring on this? Thanks much, Brett
The FICO model groups similar requests like home and car loan queries that fall into a short time (e.g. a week or a month) and counts them as a single query. I had the same thing happen when I bought a car last year and I've had some luck getting the queries that didn't turn into a loan removed (i.e. I went from 6 queries to the 2 by the loan company that actually wrote the loan). But this might increase your score by only a couple of points, tops so don't expect miracles from getting them removed.
Before you worry too much about the effect of the inquiries, you should get the hard data with your FICO score. Go to www.myfico.com and pull your credit scores to get the "true" scores for your reports. As ccbob stated, they should be counted as "1" shopping inquiry per item. See how they are counted on your FICO score before worrying too much. Also, since you are shopping for credit, it is always a good idea to pull your FICO scores (and reports) before applying for credit. Also, do a google search for FICO promotional codes to help save a few dollars on getting your scores.
I pulled the scores from www.myfico.com, and they were lower than I had hoped (based on what I had seen at truecredit), but not as bad as they were before I started. I'm not sure how to tell how the inquiries are counting there, however. If I look in the inquiries section they're all listed out. Inquiries weren't mentioned the 'bad things about your report' section, however. I realize that it might only buy me a few points, but I need all the points I can get, and if it's easy enough to delete some of them or get the CRA's to merge them into one then it might be worth it. Thanks again, Brett
Remember the credit report is simply the "Raw Data" for whatever scoring model is being applied. When I got a mortgage, they presented the score and showed the different inquiries for the car loan grouped as one query. Also TrueCredit scores tend to vary in absolute values when compared to FICO, but seem to track in relative terms (e.g. if TC scores go up, FICO scores go up). Mortgage brokers seem to use a slightly different model than MyFico because the mortgage broker's scores were different by a couple of points from MyFico taken the day before. Granted things can also change in a day.
From what I've read and seen in my own credt history, credit inquiries made around the same time for the same purpose don't make a very big impact on anything. If you start applying for a bunch of different credit lines at the same time, you'd probably set off alarms AND drive your score down a bunch. Look, banks WANT you to get credit. CRAs exist to serve the banks. If people worry too much about the impact a single inquiry is going to make, there's a chance they'd just pay cash instead of applying for that new credit line. Or use another card. Don't sweat the small stuff. Focus on items that might be having a much greater impact on your overall score.
The most likely they were counted more as "single shopping" inquiries. You can try disputing w/the CRAs, often they will delete inquiries. Different strategies work for different CRAs. Do a search for "removing inquiries" on this forum, and you'll find the threads of how they have been successfully removed.
