Lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to remove hard inquiries from a credit report, so I thought I’d take a moment to answer it for you!
There are two types of inquiries: Hard inquiries and soft inquiries.
A Hard Inquiry is when a lender requests your report as part of a loan or credit application. This type of inquiry stays on your report for 2 years, but -- it only impacts your credit score for 12 months.
So if the inquiry is older than 12 months, there’s no need to worry about it at all! You don’t need to waste your time on it, because It has zero effect on your score.
Whereas a Soft Inquiry is when someone accesses your report but they don’t necessarily intend to loan you money or extend credit to you, and they aren’t always associated with a credit application.
For example, It might be your existing creditor checking on your credit health, or some other reason. But the most important thing to understand is that soft inquiries do not impact your credit score at all - they’re simply a record of who requested it.
So if it’s a SOFT inquiry, it has zero effect on the credit score.
Now, if you or your clients have a lot of recent hard inquiries dragging down their credit scores, here’s what you do about it:
First thing you really need to do is work on removing any and all conflicting personal information.
What that means is, dispute all the misspelled names, aliases, the old addresses, the incorrect and outdated employment information wrong date of birth or social and anything else that appears in the personal information section of the clients report.
Here’s why this is important:
The personal information that you're removing comes from inquiries!
That's right! Each time your report is pulled, the information from that application is added to your report and is tied to the inquiries you want to remove.
The people filling in and submitting your applications often make clerical errors which is the cause for all the discrepancies.
By simply removing the bad personal information, you have a much better shot at getting the inquiries tied to them deleted.
Secondly, you need to challenge the hard inquiries themselves.
Now, you only dispute hard inquiries that are less than 12 months old because if they are older than a year, they don't impact your scores!
And remember, the same is true of soft inquiries. They don't impact credit scores either, so disputing them is a waste of time.
But here’s the most important thing to remember when disputing inquiries:
It’s important that you do not dispute inquiries that are tied to open pre-existing accounts or accounts that your client just applied for that they really want, like with a creditor that may have an open application.
This is because the dispute on the inquiry may cause an automatic denial on that application or it could result in an open credit card account suddenly getting closed without warning, which could lower the score a LOT.
So just check to see if the client has any open account associated with each inquiry because you don’t want to dispute inquiries from accounts that are currently open and in good standing.
Now when you do challenge the inquiries you do this with the 3 credit bureaus by simply sending a Round 1 letter.
When you log in to your Credit Repair Cloud account choose “round 1” from our letter library and fill out the reason and instruction for the bureaus.
What works really well and is super simple is just choosing, “I do not remember applying with the creditor, please remove this inquiry.”
Remember, just like any other type of item - if they don't remove it right away, you can always send follow-up letters, warning letters, reinvestigation letters or file complaints if necessary.
Whether working on your own credit or your client’s the key to ALL disputing is persistence! Keep applying pressure and don't take no for an answer.
And if you don’t have a Credit Repair Cloud account and would like to get that letter for FREE, sign up for our free 30 day trial at creditrepaircloud.com.
Or if you want to start your very own credit repair business, sign up for our Credit Hero Challenge where we’ll walk you by the hand, and in just a couple weeks, you’ll be the proud owner of your own credit repair business AND will have 3 shiny new certificates to show your new clients! We’re starting a new challenge soon, so join today at creditherochallenge.com.
I hope to see you on the inside! Until then, keep changing lives!
