The impact of hard inquiries on your credit report is a small one, but it can be a noticeable one if you have applied for several lines of credit at the same time. Many South Africans are confused about what credit inquiries are, what they mean for your credit report, and how to address any errors or fraudulent activity you may find.
How to Remove Inquiries From Your Credit Report?
Under normal circumstances, you will not be responsible for removing inquiries from your credit report at all. Instead, they will fall away over time as you get further from the date of the inquiry. However, you can report fraudulent inquiries, should you detect them and wish to.
Let’s recap what a credit inquiry is before we look further at this. Two types of inquiry can be made on your credit report. A ‘soft’ inquiry could be something like you monitoring your own credit score. These generate no footprint at all and have no impact on your credit score or creditworthiness.
When lenders are seriously considering you for credit, however, they will generate what is called a ‘hard’ inquiry. Hard inquiries do have a small impact on your credit report, about 10-20 points. By itself, one single hard inquiry will not have much impact. If you apply for many new lines of credit in a short time, however, those small hits will add up. This is because applying for a lot of credit in a short time is seen as a red flag behavior- one that could indicate to the lender that there is a change in your financial circumstances.
What Is The Fastest Way To Remove Credit Inquiries?
With this in mind, you probably already understand why credit inquiries are not something you can remove from your report unless they are fraudulent. If the inquiries were legitimate, they would slowly have less and less of an impact on your score over time. They will fall away entirely after 12 months.
Fraud does occur, however, including scammers trying to take out new credit in your name. If you notice you are seeing hard inquiries on your report, but you have not applied for credit recently, this is something you must address. You can approach the bureaus via their website, and make the application to have a fraudulent entry deleted from your account.
Once you send your proof and application through to the bureau, they will have 20 working days to respond. If you are unsatisfied with the result, you can then escalate the matter to the credit ombudsman, who will have the final say in the matter.
Will Removing Inquiries Increase My Credit Score?
When hard inquiries fall off your credit report, you will see a small boost in your credit score. Remember, however, that their impact is very small- 10 to 20 points under most circumstances. They only have a real effect when there are many inquiries cumulatively impacting your report. So unless you have spotted actual fraud in your name, it is not really worth worrying about this impact too much.
If there are fraudulent inquiries, of course, you should immediately address these, as it is a sign someone is trying to steal your credit. If they were generated by your behavior, such as seeking many new credit lines at once, you will be best served by waiting for them to drop off your credit report naturally. While they will have a small impact for up to 12 months, most of it will fade after a 3 to 6-month period, anyway.
How Many Inquiries Are Too Many?
As you’ve already seen from the rest of the article, a single hard inquiry won’t have a big impact on your report. Nor will 2 or 3 if you are shopping around for the best deal on a loan or other credit product. However, 10 hard inquiries, even at 10 points each, in a short time could impact your credit score by over 100 points- and that is a big deal!
When you are looking for new credit, try to keep your applications to 3 or fewer to minimize the impact of the credit inquiries on your credit score. If you legitimately need to open several new credit lines, try to space it out over 6 months or a year to avoid a negative impact.
Hopefully, you now feel much more confident about how hard inquiries work, and why they have a small impact on your credit score. Armed with this information, you will be able to manage their impact on your credit score much more effectively. Should you spot new hard inquiries you did not initiate cropping up on your report, take immediate action. Report the fraud to the credit bureaus, and apply to have the inquiry removed from your report.
