Forgive me if this is well known on FT. I'm a newbie and didn't find this with a search, but you can use the credit monitoring service freecreditscore.com to simulate what effect more hard inquiries will have on your credit score.

After applying for 3 cards in 2 months (Chase Sapphire, 2xCiti AA) for myself and 4 for my husband (one oops, 2xCiti AA, and Chase Sapphire), I checked free credit reports (annualcreditreport.com) and signed up (temporarily) to freecreditscore.com to get a feel for my credit score.

My score is considerably lower (35-50 pts) than it was last summer because I stupidly, stupidly cancelled 2 credit cards dating from 1996 recently before I realized the importance of credit age. Did I mention stupid?

It was easy to tell that my recent credit apps hadn't caused the decline, tho, because the freecreditscore.com site had a simulator where you can test the effect of different variables including the number of hard inquiries on your account.

In my case, Experian showed 4 hard inquiries and gave me a score of 796. If I adjusted the number of hard inquiries to 0, my score would jump to 808. If I had 7+ hard inquiries, my score would drop to 787.

I've read many places the estimate of 6 pts per hard inquiry. In my case the simulator showed I had lost 4 pts for every inquiry, and would lose a total of 9 more points (avg 3 per) for 3 more inquiries.

Hope this is helpful to other newbies.

Akp

PS - note that you can immediately cancel the monitoring service and there is no charge. I think you have up to 7 days to cancel.

www.creditkarma.com Has a simulator, and the website and service are free.

Keep in mind there are different scoring models too. FICO, TransRisk, Vantage, etc. They have different ranges and scoring criteria.

CreditKarma knocked my score (high 700s) down by 2 points when I added 1 simulated inquiry to my current 4. Those 4, 3 of which were grouped around a re-fi in a two-week period so they may only be factored in as 2, knocked my score down 10 points about a year ago.

btw, I received my actual credit score from Experian yesterday and CreditKarma was dead-on - same exact number.

That's surprising. Mine was mid 700s and Creditkarma gave me like 695

Your credit scores are high enough so that canceling those cards as you did should not bother you at all.

CreditKarma pulls from TransUnion. It is very likely that TransUnion's data (and thus CreditKarma's score) are different from scores which may be reported to you by Experian or Equifax. Multiple reasons why:

1. The bureaus may have different data from your creditors. For example, a creditor might report your account only to one of the three bureaus. This is rare (usually they report to all three) but it does happen. This will cause differences in scores across credit bureaus.
2. The credit bureaus get updates on your accounts at different times. Even on one account, you will probably see different balances depending on when the credit bureaus were last updated with your most recent payments.
3. Inquiries will be different. When pulling your credit, unless it's for something major (such as a mortgage), creditors typically only pull from one bureau. The number of inquiries affects your credit score, so this is another reason why it will vary from bureau to bureau.
4. The bureaus have different scoring models. FICO, TransRisk, etc. Thus when you are comparing scores, you may not be comparing apples to apples. A newcomer to the game is the VantageScore, which is intended to make scores comparable across bureaus.

This is why CreditKarma exactly matching the Experian score is actually a coincidence rather than something that should be expected.