An intelligent approach to credit repair should focus on priorities. Inquiries can affect your credit scores, but they are not always what they seem. There are two cases where inquiries can be safely ignored. And if you are deciding whether to challenge questionable inquiries you must factor in the diminishing affect of time.
Inquiry Exceptions
Each inquiry can lower your credit score by between one and five points depending on the overall content of your credit report. The more limited your credit the bigger the impact. The FICO scoring model makes a special exception in two specific cases, mortgages and automobiles. You may have as many mortgage or auto finance inquiries as you wish in any 45 day period of time and they will only count as one inquiry. In addition, the impact will not hit your score for 30 days. This exception was made to allow comparison shopping by consumers without penalizing them. If you are evaluating inquiries as part of your credit repair project you can safely ignore these two types of inquiries.
Credit Repair and Inquiry Timing
Inquiries can continue to report for two years. But this does not mean that they will continue to have a consistent impact on your credit scores over the entire time. It is important to know, for credit repair purposes, that the impact of an inquiry fades fairly quickly. Generally speaking, inquires older than six months can be ignored. There is little credit repair benefit to be gained by causing older inquires to be deleted. So unless you are doing some very subtle fine-tuning you should focus your efforts elsewhere. If you are in our program we will automatically examine your inquires to determine their relative importance.