My last mortgage I pulled with 3 different lenders over the course of 2 weeks and I only took a small score hit with the first one. I believe it's 45 days for you to shop rates as much as you want. To me it's most important to be able to do that with the mortgage models (5,4,2) since any reasonable person is going to compare rates.
@Focker69 wrote:Given that this is a much older version of Fico. Does anyone know how it actually treats inquiries? I know on the newer versions, it will treat mulitiple inquiries of the same type of within a specified time period as one inquiry. Does anyone know if it is different with 5,4 and 2?
I'm of the belief that it penalizes inquiries more than FICO 8 does.
There's no general rule about aggregating multiple inquiries of the same type; it's my understanding that that applies only to mortgage and car loan applications.
My personal DPs are a 0-10 point hit.
That is to say that I took a 10 point hit to my FICO2 when I applied for my Amex Platinum, but 6 months later when I got my Amex Gold, I took no hit at all. Those pulls were both after I moved to a Clean Profile. I also took no hit when I opened my CSP a year before that.
I applied for a mortgage right after the Platinum Card and took an additional 5-12 points (hard to be exact because of multiple INQs and TLs opening up). These scores did bounce back within a few months.
The FICO 2 is a mystery to me. What I do know:
You want to be AZEO if you can. FICO 2 likes reported balances not at all.
A new credit card can drop FICO 2 by 20 points or more.
Mortgage INQ's in the same 2-3 week period in the same month will likely be aggregated. No guarantees. Reduced likelihood if you span 2 months.
Weird data point: today my FICO 2 dropped from 794 to 790. The only difference (that I could tell) is that a card previously reporting $500 (out of $27.7K) now reports a zero balance. I do have 2 other cards reporting balances ($800/35K, $277/30K).
And we've since learned that, for the mortgage score, the card that reports must have a CL of under $30K.
The more you know ... .
The only 5, 4, or 2 DP I have is EX2 dropping from 683 to 679 when I went from 5%, 0% utilization on my 2 individual cards with 4% aggregate to 10%, 6% on individual cards with 9% aggregate. No change on EQ5 or TU4. I have no other tradelines and my mortgage scores were significantly more stable than my FICO8 (EQ was the only one significantly sensitive on FICO8 to 2 of 2 cards reporting a balance), while all 3 were VERY sensitive to the balance changes for FICO9.
