Do dings from HPs have a limit?

[llecs]

There's no one-size-fits-all with regards to FICO, but for the prev. four years, I used to track the changes by pulling my FICO the day before and the day after an inquiry just out of curiosity. I used to have upwards of 30 on EX and EQ each and much less on TU, and based on the FICO pulls in here, 90%+ of my inquiries resulted in no score impact whatsoever. I've found that any ding came when adding the first 1 or 2 or even 3, but nothing beyond that, IME. Now for FAKOs, if it matters to anyone, the opposite was true....90%+ impacted the score.

You'll experience more of an impact if the "New Credit" portion on your FICO report shows "Very Good" or "Great", vs. showing "Bad".

[llecs]

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@Freefall wrote:

Not sure if this helps or not since it doesnt mention how a Inq effects scores but I thought it was internesting... It appears that some inq stick around for only a year, others are there for 2 years....

Inq details  <-- image in my public dropbox folder

Copied it from my annual credit report...

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That's the chart for soft inquiries, none of which impact scores. Thank goodness too because I have well over 100 of them with all the CMSs, FICO pulls, and ARs going on.

[MarineVietVet]

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@bettercreditguy1 wrote:

Here is info from a  "Sample Fico Scoring Model" copyrighted 2010.  Number of inquiries in six months. If you have no inquiries you get 70 points, one inquiry you can loose 10 points, 2 inquiries 25 points, three 45 points, and four or more you can loose 50 points.

 Here is the companion information. "Number of months to recover" copyrighted 2010.

0-5    months =  20

6-11  months  = 25

12-17 months  =30

18-23 months = 38

24  plus mos   = 45

What this says is you can regain about 2/3 of your lost points at one year and all of your lost points at the two year mark with no additional inquiries or new credit. As always, your mmv. What the companion chart also says is you can loose upto 25 points for one inquiry.  Now you have a range of ten to twenty five points loss for one inquiry. Does show their are different factors and different scoring models.

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Concerning that chart this is what the former administrator of this site had to say: "Not only is that a "partial" scorecard, it's fake, and used mainly to illustrate how a scorecard works. Do they really think we'd put the real deal out there like that?"

In other words it's useless.

Edited to fix a typo.

[Anonymous]

agree with MVV... since inqs do not affect your fico score after 1 year, why does it take two years to get your points back?  Makes no sense...

[RobertEG]

There is one public disclosure relating to FICO scoring of inquiries that may be of interest, although a bit old.

In 2002, the Virginia Commission on Insurance issued a directive that any private auto insurer in the state who uses credit scoring models for risk based pricing of insurance must submit a copy of those models to the Commission.  As a result, basics of the FICO insurance based model were submitted to the Commission.

In a summary of those models, it was reported that  the insurance-based model capped the effect of inquiries at 5 or more.

Admittedly dated, and also restricted to insurance-based models, but at least a public disclosure of capped number of inquiries. 

Who knows if that has changed since 2002........

See "Inside the Black Box, Review and Analysis of Personal Lines Credit Scoring Models Filed in the State of Virginia," Wu et al, 2002. 

[Anonymous]

Hum this is very intresting to me as well.  Does anyone know for sure because they were tracking it like a hawk if the recovery points if any hit the following month after the 24 month mark?  Or is it like most things kind of case by case no real structure or answer becasue everyone is diffrent?

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hum this is very intresting to me as well.  Does anyone know for sure because they were tracking it like a hawk if the recovery points if any hit the following month after the 24 month mark?  Or is it like most things kind of case by case no real structure or answer becasue everyone is diffrent?

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HaulingTheScoreUp (I miss her) had a great writeup on this a month or two ago but I couldn't find it when I went searching for it.

She at least took a hit when she went from I think 3->4 inquiries, and then when an inquiry fell off, her score bounced back to the pre-inquiry state.  It's very much YMMV; however, inquiry damage isn't linear, and the more you have, the less likely you are to trip over one of the magic boundaries that causes additional damage to be assessed.  I think if I remember her tracking correctly, inquiries >8 seemed to have neglible impact, but I'm not positive I have that number right.