So this probably ought to be over on Understanding FICO Scoring, or maybe General Credit Topics, but I read a post a few days ago asking about when your scores change when an inq hits 1 year.
Also, this might cheer up some of those going nuts with boredom in the Garden. 
So anyway, until two days ago, I had 4 inqs under one year on Equifax. Two were the result of genuine apps (Navy and Chase Southwest VISA), one was due to me trying for a CLI online for Home Depot (Citi), grumble, grumble, and one was completely bogus from PenFed when I had trouble with a pre-approval and called for help. (snarl) Scores plunged 16 points when the last one (PenFed) hit.
Saturday 4/14 was the one-year anniversary of my inq from Navy. Since I have Credit Watch Gold, and I never really know what provokes Scorewatch into action, I pulled a free report that day. (No score with that service.)
To my amazement, I got an alert today that my EQ had jumped 16 points. The ONLY thing that has happened was the inq hitting one year Saturday. Despite obsessive monitoring, there were no score changes from the -16 when the PenFed inq hit to the +16 today, with Navy no longer counting.
So, a couple of things:
- At least for me, the inq stopped counting when it hit its one-year birthday, not at the end of the month.
- And having four inqs instead of three can most definitely have a significant score impact for those in certain buckets. In my case, it's 22 years total history, 6 (I think) years AAoA, 1 30 day still reporting from 8/2005, no significant derogs. Revolving util is under 5%.
As always YMMV.
I did not realize it until I lost my mortgage approval with the DU system and had to reapply for a 20 yr mortgage because the underwriting software for approvals had changed from the initial CR they pulled. My scores dropped 20 or so point because of inquiries and I had to do some major shuffling to get them back up into approval range. That's why.I encourage borderline applicants in the mortgage forum to wait until their.scores are higher than they need to be!
FICO 8: 
Goal: Gardening!
Goal: Gardening!
@Anonymous wrote:It's pretty difficult for people to accept that a ton of inquiries aren't a good thing, score-wise.
I think it's more that many folks either don't care, or care too much. It's graduated, 0, 1, 2-3, 4-7ish? Something like that for tiered bucketing on inquiries, and the amount of damage (or healing in this case) is probably dependant on what strata of credit score your at anyway (if not outright specific bucket).
Hauling, when was the Penfed inquiry? Recent or was it older which might make the line-item comparison a little sloppy? Thank you for sharing though, interesting stuff.
Hauling, do you know the impact that an inquiry falling off has on a score? I have at least two inquiries set to fall off in September and October of this year. They were from when I rented my last apartment.
Starting Score: 760
@frogfan12 wrote:Hauling, do you know the impact that an inquiry falling off has on a score? I have at least two inquiries set to fall off in September and October of this year. They were from when I rented my last apartment.
As I wrote, YMMV (your mileage may vary.) In other words, it can be all over the map.
For most people, it's 3-5 points max. But in some situations, as in mine, it can be far, far more.
It also depends on how many inqs you have before they fall off, and how many after. (You only look at the inqs on one report, not all three combined.)
For instance, usually (I emphasize, usually) the first inq on a given report doesn't affect your scores. (The new account might, though.) But then the second would. The third might not, and then the fourth would.
They generally run out of gas around 5-6, so if you have 12 inqs on one report over the last year, then hey, one more won't hurt. 
Which report has the inqs, and how many will be left on that report when these two fall off?