THREE two year old HPs dropped this week, FICO upped 7 points

[Fico2Go]

All else equal my scores went up 7 points.  The only change was 3 hard inquiries dropped from two years ago. 

We've been told that HPs don't effect scores after 6-12 months.  This is not the case.   HPs do impact scores the full 2 years. 

Seven points don't seem like a whole lot but if you are on the edge of getting approved or denial it doesn't count.  Also if you are apping for a home loan an extra 7 point can make or break your chance. 

Just something to share.

[chalupaman]

Interesting. I will certainly keep that in mind. It's been commonly said that inquiries don't have as much of an impact after 6 months and don't have too much of an effect on the score after a year.

[Revelate]

They don't count after 1 year.  This has been stated explicitly by FICO and has held up under massive amounts of anecdotal evidence.

The problem with all of these reports is that the score monitoring solutions do not catch everything (some barely catch anything seemingly) and as a result a lot of interstital changes go unnoticed and unremarked and only get summed up with a balance update or whatever.  As a result, scores can change from multiple things and all of those rolled up into one update unfortunately.  Even the best of the bunch, Scorewatch based on Equifax data has this issue: tax lien dropped off, no notice, no nothing, large positive change following week on a balance increase in my personal experience... um no.

Short of a full before and after report there isn't any way to prove that 2 year old inquiries falling off were the cause of the change; however, I'll note that every single time someone has claimed something similarly, there has been another change on the reports which caused the change after disclosure of the report information and subsequent analysis and discussion.

Also for completeness, while I don't think this is another CK strikes again issue, their commentary counting inquiries for the full 2 years should be zealously ignored.

[takeshi74]

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@Fico2Go wrote:

All else equal my scores went up 7 points.  The only change was 3 hard inquiries dropped from two years ago. 

We've been told that HPs don't effect scores after 6-12 months.  This is not the case.   HPs do impact scores the full 2 years. 

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That seems like jumping to casuality IMO.  While you may have not noticed any changes aside from the dropped HP's that doesn't necessarily mean that there were no other changes.  It's not just a matter of whether items appear or fall off one's report.  Aging, accumulating history, variations in utilization, etc all can have an impact as well.  Rebucketing is another potential factor and difficult to account for.  If you want to analyze a trend you need to use more than just a single data point --  i.e more than just one person's score changes.

[MissMoni223]

CONGRATS on your FICO score going up & thanks for sharing!!!