Soft Inquiries--paranoid

[Smarter]

I am wondering if I should be concerned that Household Mortgage has been doing a soft inquiry on both my credit report and my DH's credit report for at least the past year every month. We had our mortgage through them and it was forclosed on in September of 2006. According to the DOFD it should fall off this fall. The account shows a zero balance, but does report as 120 days late. The inquiries are only on Equifax. I have been in total gardening mode for a long time now and am hoping to maybe buy a house this year. I also have softs from Household bank, but that is probably for an old charged off credit card that just fell off last month. Should I put off the house buying until this falls off? Why would they be softing us? Yes, I am paranoid.

[Anonymous]

You are the only peson who can see Soft Inquiries.  I wouldn't worry about it, they can't do any hard hits without your permission.

[Anonymous]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

You are the only peson who can see Soft Inquiries.  I wouldn't worry about it, they can't do any hard hits without your permission.

---

This is not necessarily true.  If the OP still owes them any money, they have a permissible purpose to do a credit check, hard or soft is irrelevant.

[Smarter]

I guess that is why I am kind of worried about it. I don't believe we owe them any money. I have never recieved anyhting saying that we do...I just don't know why they would do monthly soft pulls. The house was sold at auction and all I ever got was the notice of that.

[Anonymous]

---

@Smarter wrote:
I guess that is why I am kind of worried about it. I don't believe we owe them any money. I have never recieved anyhting saying that we do...I just don't know why they would do monthly soft pulls. The house was sold at auction and all I ever got was the notice of that.

---

Well, how much was it sold for?  If they didn't get back everything that you owed at the time, you would still owe them the difference.  You also mentioned something about a CC you had with them?  You should look into this more I think.  Do you still have any of the paperwork they would've sent you for the total sale amount and what you owed?  If you do in fact owe them any money, that gives them permissible purpose to pull your credit, for the purpose of collecting.  This does not end after 7.5 years, like reporting (or however long forclosures are).

[Smarter]

I am going to have to dig back through my records. I know that the house sold at auction for less than was owed. I think that we looked into whether or not we had to pay that difference back at the time...I can't quite remember. Wouldn't they have done something to try and collect? Hmm. The credit card was charged off and sold to Midland. Both fell off last month. I guess my main goal is to apply for a mortgage with minimal possibility of problems. I read too many horror stories on the Mortgage forum! Both my DH and my scores are 700 or above--well except I don't know experian for sure of course. We decided to just continue renting and let time take care of the negative credit report items that we could not do anything about.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, it really stinks IMO.  I don't feel anyone should be able to hard pull unless you give permission, and that CAs should be limited to soft pulls.  That isn't the case though.  It is possible that you do still owe some money and they are checking your credit to figure out if you might be able to pay.  Some CAs even subscribe to a form of credit monitoring on you (and others that owe them money).  The bureaus will send them alerts when you get new credit cards, mortage inquiries, or other signs that you might be able to pay.

If it were me, I would just hope they keep only doing soft inquiries.  But if you only owe them a smaller amount of money, perhaps you could get in touch with them and settle it once and for all so they will stop going away.