The appearance of inquiries on your credit report can be alarming, but they may not have the impact that you think. Here is the credit repair information you need to understand and manage credit inquiries.
The Inquiry Affect
There are cases where inquiries should be disputed, but they are not always what they seem. Before you launch a credit report repair offensive let’s take a look at the facts. The impact of a single inquiry on your credit score can range from 1 point to 5 points based on the overall content of your credit. The more limited your credit the more of a hit your score will take for each inquiry. The good news is that the impact of an inquiry fades quickly. Inquiries can continue to report for two years, but the affect on your scores becomes negligible after 6 months, so you will want to think carefully about whether you want to prioritize inquiries in your credit repair effort.
Exceptional Cases
There are two cases where a credit repair response may not be needed at all. Mortgage inquiries and auto finance inquiries get special treatment by the FICO scoring model. You may have as many mortgage or auto finance inquiries in any 45 day period as you wish and they will, as an aggregate, be treated as a single inquiry. In addition, the impact will not hit your score until 30 days after the date of the first inquiry. These exceptions were written into the FICO model to allow consumers to shop intelligently for loans without being penalized.
Credit Repair Prioritization
If you examine the inquiries on your credit report and discover that the majority are in one of these two exception categories you may decide to leave them alone. If you are in our credit repair program we will automatically review your inquiries along with everything else. We will categorize the inquiries and determine the amount of score damage, if any, and schedule our credit repair efforts accordingly.