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Credit journeys begin with credit reports. With a copy of your report in hand, you can generate a plan: you can get out of debt, remove errors, or apply for great-value financial products, for example. If you don’t know how to do a soft credit check—or if you’re worried that you’ll damage your credit score by pulling a copy of your credit report—you’re in the right place. Read on to find out how to do a soft credit check and check your own credit score.
A soft credit check occurs when someone pulls your credit report but not to evaluate you for a loan or other credit you applied for. Here are some examples of soft credit checks:
There are many reasons to perform a soft credit check on your own credit. Most people simply know this as “pulling their own credit report.” You should do this regularly to:
Two different types of credit inquiry exist: hard and soft. Applications for credit generate hard inquiries on your credit report. Soft inquiries do not show up on your credit report.
When you apply for credit, you give the financial institution permission to pull your credit report so that it can decide whether or not to approve you. When the credit card or loan company asks for your credit report, the credit bureau notes the request—and that, in a nutshell, is a hard inquiry.
Hard inquiries stay on your credit report for up to two years, but they make less of an impact after around 12 months. The more hard inquiries you have on your credit report, the more your score may decrease.
Tip: Companies need your permission (in the form of your application) to run a hard credit check. If you see a hard inquiry on your report that you did not authorize, you may want to work with a credit repair organization to challenge it.
Hard inquiries happen when:
Soft inquiries happen when:
Soft credit checks don’t impact your credit score at all. In fact, most people who pull your credit report can’t even see soft credit inquiries. Only you can see them on your credit report. This lets you know who’s looking at your credit information.
However, hard inquiries do impact your score. Each hard inquiry can have a slightly negative effect on your score. If you have too many hard inquiries on your credit in a short time, the impact can be bigger and more noticeable. Depending on where your credit score was in the first place, it can even be enough to drop you from good credit to only fair credit.
One of the reasons hard credit checks impact your score negatively is that they can be an indicator that all is not right in your financial world. Someone who’s managing money and credit well typically doesn’t need to apply for tons of credit over a few weeks or months. If you’re applying all over the place for credit, it can signal you might have money problems. That means you’re less likely to be able to pay your bills on time and as agreed, so you’re a bigger risk to creditors.
That being said, there are some occasions when people might legitimately have several hard inquiries all around the same time. If you’re shopping rates or loan terms for a mortgage or vehicle, for example, you might apply with several creditors. In these cases, numerous hard inquiries within a few weeks of each other are treated as a single inquiry as far as their impact on credit scores goes. That means the impact is minimal.
Hard inquiries typically cause your credit score to drop by a few points unless you have multiple inquiries within a short window.
Hard inquiries stay on your credit report for up to 2 years. However, the impact each inquiry has on your credit score diminishes over time, and they no longer affect your score at all after 1 year.
Checking your own credit shouldn’t hurt your credit score one bit. You can pull your own credit report in a number of different ways.
If you apply for credit but get refused, you’ll receive a letter called an “adverse action notice.” An adverse action notice gives you the right to claim a free copy of your credit report from the applicable bureau within 60 days of your credit denial.
Lots of factors influence your credit score. In basic terms, your credit score is a numerical representation of how reliable you are from a credit perspective. When you make loan repayments on time, for instance, this should have a positive impact on your credit score depending on other scoring factors. Most credit scores are based on the following five things:
So, 90% of your credit score isn’t based on account inquiries—and soft inquiries don’t make any impact at all. Depending on your credit history and other factors though, making several applications for credit in a short time could drop your score temporarily.
Is it bad to check your credit score? In a word, no. If you’re curious about your credit report, we recommend signing up for ExtraCredit. Doing so won’t impact your credit score—in fact, the knowledge you gain could better help you maintain a good credit history. You can use the information you find to build a custom credit plan or to work to drive your score up from good to great.
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