First, some terminology. FICO is your legitimate credit score delivered from Fair Issac. Most credit companies use this score to determine whether to give you credit or not. FAKO is slang term used to describe a “score” that individual credit reporting agencies give you. FAKO’s are from TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax websites. They are hardly ever used by the credit industry and a FAKO score is more often than not way off from your actual FICO score. That is why people call them FAKO scores… they are fake.

Now for the tip of the day: FICO and FAKO scores use inquiries on your reports differently to determine their scores. FICO uses inquiries in the past year, FAKO’s usually use the past two years. So don’t worry too much about those one year or older inquiries, they won’t matter at all for nearly all banks. Just let them fall off and concentrate on keeping those less than one year old inquiries off.