While soft inquiries can occur without your knowledge, such as those annoying pre-approved credit card offers you receive in the mail, hard inquiries occur when you apply for a loan and the creditor reviews your credit before granting the loan.
Soft inquiries do not affect credit scores and are not visible to potential lenders that may review your credit reports. They are visible to you and will stay on your credit reports for 12 to 24 months, depending on the type.
According to FICO, a hard inquiry from a lender will decrease your credit score five points or less. If you have a strong credit history and no other credit issues, you may find that your scores drop even less than that. The drop is temporary.
In general, credit inquiries have a small impact on your FICO Scores. For most people, one additional credit inquiry will take less than five points off their FICO Scores. For perspective, the full range for FICO Scores is 300-850.
A soft credit check shows the same information as a hard inquiry. This includes your loans and lines of credit as well as their payment history and any collections accounts, tax liens or other public records in your name.
Each lender typically has a limit of how many inquiries are acceptable. After that, they will not approve you, no matter what your credit score is. For many lenders, six inquiries are too many to be approved for a loan or bank card.
One way is to go directly to the creditor by sending them a certified letter in the mail. In your letter, be sure to point out which inquiry (or inquiries) were not authorized, and then request that those inquiries be removed. You could also contact the 3 big credit bureaus where the unauthorized inquiry has shown up.
By following a few tips, you could raise your score by 50 points or more before the end of the year.
If you find an unauthorized or inaccurate hard inquiry, you can file a dispute letter and request that the bureau remove it from your report. The consumer credit bureaus must investigate dispute requests unless they determine your dispute is frivolous. Still, not all disputes are accepted after investigation.
According to FICO, "Statistically, people with six inquiries or more on their credit reports can be up to eight times more likely to declare bankruptcy than people with no inquiries on their reports."
Soft Inquiries or Soft Credit Pulls
These do not impact credit scores and don't look bad to lenders. In fact, lenders can't see soft inquiries at all because they will only show up on the credit reports you check yourself (aka consumer disclosures).
Credit scores can drop due to a variety of reasons, including late or missed payments, changes to your credit utilization rate, a change in your credit mix, closing older accounts (which may shorten your length of credit history overall), or applying for new credit accounts.
Hard inquiries serve as a timeline of when you have applied for new credit and may stay on your credit report for two years, although they typically only affect your credit scores for one year. Depending on your unique credit history, hard inquiries could indicate different things to different lenders.
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