Hard vs Soft Check?

[Anonymous]

What's the difference and how do you know when a creditor is doing one or the other?

[Anonymous]

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Fr0zen wrote:
What's the difference and how do you know when a creditor is doing one or the other?

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The difference:

Hard inquiries count against your score for one year.  All hard inquiries in the last two years are visible to anyone pulling your report.

Soft inquiries do not count against your score at all, and are visible only to you when you pull your own report.

How you know:

Hard inquiries are pulled when you apply for new credit in the form of credit cards and installment loans (including mortgages and student loans).  Sometimes collection agencies will pull a hard inquiry when they receive an account that belongs to you.  Some banks also pull hard inquiries when you open checking or savings accounts, although the propriety of this has been debated in these forums.  Credit unions usually pull hard inquiries when you join, and also when you apply for any of their products.

Soft inquiries are generated when someone pulls your reports for other purposes (not related to an application for credit), including employment, marketing (those preapproval offers you get in the mail), and whenever you pull your own reports.

Most creditors pull the occasional soft inquiry to perform account reviews on their existing debtors.  This is so they can get a look at your current overall credit picture, and make decisions on your account accordingly.

For CLI requests, some creditors pull a hard and some pull a soft.

When you view your report, hard and soft inquiries are listed in seperate sections so you can tell the difference.

[Anonymous]

I see, thanks for the info. I've had 3 hard checks this year. One of them was in Jan and 2 of them were in December. Is this a bad number?

[Anonymous]

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Fr0zen wrote:
I see, thanks for the info. I've had 3 hard checks this year. One of them was in Jan and 2 of them were in December. Is this a bad number?

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I thought you didn't have any reports.  How do you have inquiries?

Is 3 INQs a bad number?  That's not bad really, but 0-1 is best.

For reference, I have 4 each on EQ and TU, and 6 on EX.

But I applied for a lot of credit last year.  Where did yours come from?

[haulingthescoreup]

Also, not to derail cheddar's response and question, each hard inq is counted only on the bureau(s) from which it was pulled. So if you app, and they hard only EQ, you have one more inq on EQ, but not on the other two. If you get the CC or whatever, once it starts reporting, it should be on all three.

If you ever play with the FICO Score Estimator (different from the sims on your EQ and TU reports), be sure to enter only one CRA's count of hards on the screen that asks how many times you've app'd.

http://www.myfico.com/FICOCreditScoreEstimator/Estimator.aspx

--a fun way to kill some time, and play what-if and if-only!