when exactly does FICO start ignoring an old inquiry?

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

In the name of sharing data, some data -- 

Last week my score was 720 at Experian, it has been stuck at that number for a couple months, and it was up to date as they had posted an updated balance and I believe that kicks off a rescore. 

Since then over the past week my TWO most recent inquiries rolled over the 6 month mark, and then another statement balance posted -- in fact, iimproving my utilization slightly because when it posted Experian picked up on the auto CLI from $1000 to $2500 I got from Synchrony on my Amazon store card. That extra $1500 shaved perhaps a half percent off my utilization.

So those are both events that SHOULD raise my score--slightly better utilization AND two inquiries aging over 6 months.

Want to guess what my score is this week?

720. No change.

What that data tells us: Nothing happens to an inquiry at the 6 month mark, and minor changes in utilization (from something between 4-5% to something slightly lower still between 4-5%) don't matter.

Unfortunately.

Now I have my oldest card AGING to the 12 month mark in 30 days. I am predicting I will see a score rise from that, however small.

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Hello Canadian!  You raise some interesting points.  The most interesting of all is one which comes up a fair amount here.  I will describe it in general terms as follows:

1. You have a credit monitoring service (CMS) that provides FICO 8 scores (possibly myFICO)
2. Your credit profile changed on day X in some way that you had believed should have altered your score (if the score were pulled the following day).
3. As of day X+5 (say) you have received no notification from the CMS that your score has changed.
4. Therefore you conclude that your score has not changed and that the event in question doesn't have a FICO impact.

Is that a fair description of your situation?  It's also possible that when you say that your scores have not changed, you mean that you paid for a full recalculation of the scores a few days later, rather than just passively waiting for notification that a change has occurred.  I couldn't tell which for sure, but in most cases it is the passively waiting for a CMS notification that people mean.

I do not have much hands on experience with myFICO or any other FICO-based CMS.  For me they cost too much money so I tend to use them as a one-time pit stop to collect a zillion scores every 13 months or so -- for monthly updates I use free tools like Karma or the scores that come with my credit cards.

But listening to the veterans here who use myFICO as their primary CMS, I think I have heard them say that an event on your profile can definitely trigger a score change and yet you don't get notified immediately.  Sometime, I think they say, the service waits for a while, possibly until the score change from multiple events is substantial enough, and then reports it.

At any rate, the bottom line is that #4 is not an inference that you can confidently make.  Just because you haven't been notified doesn't mean that the score has not changed.

[Anonymous]

Close. I am using the Experian Credit Tracker product, which allows me to log in and generate a new credit report at any time (each day if I want), which generates a score based on the information it has. It is NOT like myfico where it regenerates the score only once a week and only when there is a "trigger", which makes it hard to determine what made the difference. It generates a new score for me every time I log in and ask for one, based on a report it generates for me at that time.

I also closely track all my credit "events" in a spreadsheet, using my excel spreadsheet I know the exact number of days until my next inquiry ages to 6 months, I know the exact age of my account, etc., and when I see these events coming up I am always curious to know what impact they will have, if any. So in this case I logged in and viewed my score a few days before the inquiries aged to 6, and then I looked again a few days after. 

I was very curious to know if an inquiry aging to 6 months was going to make a difference, and in my case it didn't. 

There are some possibilities as to why it didn't:

1. It just doesn't matter

2. There is a maximum penalty you can pay for too many inquiries, and I exceed it, so the slight improvement didn't help

3. There is a step function, the rule is "lose X points if you have (any/morethan X) inquiries within 6 months", and I still have 2 other that are only 3 months

But what I know for sure at this point is there is no simple logic that says "get 3 points at 6 months" or something like that, otherwise, my score would have changed.

[Anonymous]

Good!  So you truly regenerated the new scores.  Something I hear a lot is that people are using a product like myFICO and they conclude that, because they didn't get an alert specifying a score change, therefore no score change occured. 

As far as contributing data goes (and I know there are people here who absolutely love that) you may want to add in the future all relevant supporting info up front.  Otherwise your situation becomes like a blank slate onto which people write their own assumptions.  Specifying how you got the new scores is one example.  Likewise, if you are making conjectures about inquiries and credit U, give the exact numbers up front, e.g. my CU went from 8.7% to 8.2%.

Although I don't know the exact numbers for how your CU changed, with the ones I just gave I am pretty sure nobody thinks there should be a score change, and that's because CU (as I understand it -- I may be wrong) is interpreted by FICO and Vantage both as an integer (after one rounds up).  So in the case of the sample CU I just mentioned, FICO would see it as 9% U.  And of course, in a given scorecard, there still might be no difference between 8% U and 9%.

As far as the inquiries go, hypotheses 2 and 3 are instances of a general idea which is that FICO is likely to group inquiries (depending on the scorecard, model, and CRA).  Thus at some point (e.g. 15 to 999 inquiries) it's almost certain that FICO places a large number of inquiries in the same group.  But it may do the grouping at lower levels too: e.g. 0-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-8, etc.  The exact way it does grouping might vary between scorecards even in FICO 8 Equifax (say).

I think the "6 month" testing you are doing is really important.  It's too bad that you weren't lucky enough to have a profile with something like 4 inquiries going to 2.  If you had a test case that was that sharp and clear, it would give powerful evidence against something that is sometimes suggested: that inquiry impact begins to weaken at six months.  If there is no "weakening" that makes assessing inquiry impact a lot simpler.  If I am being penalized for an inquiry, then the impact as the same at day 3 and at day 363.

[Anonymous]

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@jamie123 wrote:

I'm pretty sure it uses the exact date as "one year". I just had my Discover card turn 1 year old mid-month in April. My score jumped 10 points at exactly the card's 1 year birthday.

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Are you able to tell whether it was the card aging to 1 year? Or the inquiry? And were they the same date? 

Recently I had a couple of inquiries hit the 1 year mark (inquiries, to the day) and saw no change in my score, where I had expected to gain at least a couple points. 

Maybe the impact will happen on the 1st? But I have muddied the water there with a mini app spree in November (CITI DC, BECU PLOC, and Discover).