I was just reading through some of the threads where people are talking about having 20 or more inquiries which seems crazy to me. How many is considered alot or detrimental to your score?
How many is too many? One more than the creditor you're applying with will tolerate seeing. Inquiries fade in significance over their two-year lifetime ... they can cost a lot of points in their youth, not so much in old age. But inquiries from known CAs and JDBs indicate collection activity, and look like heck on a manual review, while an automatic review may be programmed to detect them and disqualify the applicant due to "collection activity" shown on the report.
Anything more than 2-3 per year is going to start hurting you. An exception is the "shopping inquiries". These are inquiries where you are shopping for credit (say a mortgage or auto loan), and may have several in a short time period. FICO counts these as only "one" inquiry.
I about died when I saw what happens when you apply to those "broker competition" sites (e.g. Lending Tree). In one day after applying, I had something like 10-15 new inquiries across the three bureaus. Basically you're giving permission to each and every lender/broker to pull your credit--and they do. Fortunately, as bizwiz41 says, they group similar inquiries within 30 days together and count them as one loan application when scoring, but it sure looks bad when you look at just the raw listings.
I would say that a good rule of thumb is to space inquiries by at least 90 days ... a key feature of this minimum spacing is that new there will only be one "unseasoned" (less than 6 months old) TL on the report when any application is made.
Perhaps to go one step further, remember the addage, "only apply for credit when you need it". It's a basic tenet that will keep yu out of inquiry trouble.
Dig your well before you're thirsty. If you can get a card that has no annual fee and it is from an issuer you don't already use ... apply for it if you haven't applied in the last 90 days. Lots of credit available and a wide diversity of issuers will keep you from being harmed due to ratejacking and other misdeeds.
I agree with flacorps. When you need credit, you may not be able to get it. Grab it while you're able. Use it wisely, and when one bank screws you over, start using a product from another bank.
