45days for Equifax dispute???

[Anonymous]

They are all HARD inquiries.  Most of them are from last year's, about 90%.  I applied for a mortgage loan almost 3months ago and it specifically said in the analysis that my Equifax report was hurt by lots of inquiries, and I assumed that if I could get these inquiries go down somehow, it would help.  I had been working hard to get my EQ score up because it has about 50+ difference with TU and EX, and those 2 had more adverse accounts listed in them.  Most of my 07 collection accounts are medical in nature. 

Sorry for the off topic venting.             

Message Edited by workmywayup on 05-11-2008 10:04 AM

Message Edited by workmywayup on 05-11-2008 10:06 AM

[haulingthescoreup]

All of the inquiries relating to mortgage hunting (and car loans, btw) that occur within a certain time frame are "de-duped" (de-duplicated) and counted as one for scoring purposes. Sometimes other lenders will look at all those inquiries and think you've been on some berserk credit hunt, and you will have to gently explain to them that if they look more closely, they will see that they are all for finding a mortgage (or car loan.) 8 inqs for one mortgage are a lot different from 8 inqs for 8 different credit cards!

So that being said, you can easily get that negative comment for as few as 2 or 3 inqs on one report within the last year. I have it for 3 on EQ, but not for 2 on EX. I think it often appears as "looking for credit", or something similar. It's just not that big a hit on your scores, although some lenders (AmEx, PenFed, others) might decline you if they think that you're on a credit-hunting spree. They worry that you're in some financial disaster and trying to scarf up a bunch of new cards to tide you over, and that you might default on all of them.

I know you said that these were for a different PO Box address than yours. (I'm astonished that lenders would let you get away with not providing a street address!) In general, as an FYI for all readers, it's a really bad idea to dispute inqs that really are yours. If the account that resulted from the inq is open, you might get Fraud Alerts slammed on to all three reports. If the account is now closed, the creditor may simply stop reporting it, which will hurt your scores by losing its history.

Certainly, if an inq was not yours, or they didn't have PP (permissible purpose), you can work at getting them off. You probably won't see much score improvement, but your reports will be tidier for future credit applications.