Understanding hard inquiries (multiple hard inquiries while shopping for new car)

[Anonymous]

I feel that you guys are better educated on the subject of credit than any other single group of people on forums and message boards on the Internet. That is why I come to you with my next question. I really do appreciate yall SOO much.

Okay, so i was told by a lot of different people when I was shopping for a new car that hard inquiries on your new car could only affect you SO much. They said tht auto establishments will send your loan application off to like 15 dif banks and will present you with he best offer, and that th credit bureaus knows and understands that, so it's not like they are gonna hit you 15 different times. What I was told is that if the hard inquiries are performed within 30 days it all affects you the same. However when I looked at my report on credit karma it shows me this:

---

---

Okay well I was gonna post a photo but I do not see he camera icon (does anyone know how to post an image)? Anyways what I see is that transunion says '3-fair' and equifax says '13-very poor'.... This confuses me. Now credit karma says overall that hard inquiries have a low impact on my credit score, however I am still trying to understand what is actually true. Do they really allow for you to make several hard inquiries without it impacting your credit more than it usually would since you are shopping around for a vehicle and they know that it's for the same purpose (with it being all with if a certain amount of time).

any help would be GREATLY APPRECIATED! Thanks in advance!

[CH-7-Mission-Accomplished]

Ignore what Credit Karma says.  It is a FAKO score.

FICO will score all the automobile inq's as one for FICO scoring purposes.  They do all still appear on your reports, though, which can be unsettling to someone doing a manual review of your file.  You just have to point out that you were rate shopping for a car.  As long as they are within a short period of time - it may be 14 days -- it counts as 1 inquiry for scoring.

[gdale6]

---

@CH-7-Mission-Accomplished wrote:

Ignore what Credit Karma says.  It is a FAKO score.

FICO will score all the automobile inq's as one for FICO scoring purposes.  They do all still appear on your reports, though, which can be unsettling to someone doing a manual review of your file.  You just have to point out that you were rate shopping for a car.  As long as they are within a short period of time - it may be 14 days -- it counts as 1 inquiry for scoring.

---

Yes all auto related inquiries that post within a 2 week period and are coded as auto count as 1 in the eyes of Fico.

[Anonymous]

Not to threadjack, but the auto inquires show as separate inquiries when I bought my car last year. Is that supposed to happen?

[Anonymous]

CH 7 hit the nail on the head: all of the inquiries will appear on your report/s (it makes sense; it's not like the CRs are going to just blindly pick one inquiry out of multiple inquiries and say "Behold, this is the one that counts! This is the one we shall report, yea, and it shall be good.") But, for the purposes of calculating your FICO score, it is going to look at one inquiry or 10 as the same, assuming they all hit within the 2 week window of time.