If you have gone through your credit report lately, you will notice a section on it that is tagged “inquiries”. These inquiries affect your FICO score in various ways. You may be wondering what they are. A credit inquiry is a request made by a credit institution to access the financial information of an individual from the credit reporting bureaus. This occurs when such an individual applies for a credit card or loan.
A credit inquiry allows subsequent creditors to view the amount of credit you have requested in the last two years. Also, note that your credit score dips with each inquiry you make. If you have a few inquiries, then your score won’t be affected significantly. However, many inquiries would greatly affect your score.
With time, your credit inquiries drop off. Nevertheless, you do not have to wait that long to have them removed, as you can get rid of them faster. In this article, we have provided ways by which you can take off credit inquiries.
Before we proceed, there are two types of credit inquiries: soft pull and hard pull.
Img source: advisor.ca
Soft Pull
A soft pull occurs as a background check, as opposed to a formal credit inquiry. It does not affect your credit score in any way. Soft pulls include a personal request of one’s credit history, employment background checks, and pre-approved offers from creditors and credit cards.
Additionally, soft pulls can occur when an application is generated to rent an apartment, car, or open a bank account.
Hard Pull
A hard pull shows up when you apply for new credit like a credit card, loan, and mortgage. The creditor goes through your credit report to view past inquiries. With the information provided on the report, they can decide whether or not to extend your credit and the type of interest rate to offer.
It does not only apply to credit card and loan applications. This also occurs when there is an increase in your credit card limit or when you get a cell phone contract. Hard pulls affect your report negatively, although, temporarily for a period of two years.
How Can You Remove Credit Inquiries?
Img source: fnbolending.com
Even though credit inquiries can be removed after a period of two years, there are ways you get them off your report faster.
1. Request for Your Credit Reports
The first place to begin is to get copies of your three credit reports from the credit reporting bureaus. You can access these reports from AnnualCreditReport.com. This service can be accessed freely once every 12 months and generated from these three main bureaus: TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.
2. Examine Your Credit Reports
The “Inquiries” section can be found at the bottom of your credit report. Go through each report thoroughly to be sure these are authorized inquiries. Any unfamiliar inquiry should be reported quickly. You can reach out to the credit bureaus, requesting that they take off such inquiries.
Img source: moneycrashers.com
3. Write to the Credit Bureau
You should write a letter to the credit bureau which is responsible for the reports you are not liking. You need to identify and point out all of the items in a copy of the credit report. You can rest assured that the bureau will investigate further in order to check all of your claims. Also, they will work together with the information provided in order to find out all of the errors. Usually, these processes are finished in 30 days. However, in some cases, it can take a little bit longer than that. When it comes to the removal, it will depend on the truthfulness of your claims. In a case where it wasn’t true, the items are not going to be removed from the report.
4. Ensure That You Follow Up
Monitor the calendar and provide the credit institution 30 days for feedback. Whereby they do not respond after that period, you need to contact them to settle the dispute. If it gets way out of control, you can forward your complaint to the state banking authority. All you need is to note the date and time of the call placed to the creditor, including the letters.
How Can Hard Credit Inquiry Affect Credit Score?
Img source: kiplinger.com
When you are applying for a credit card, mortgage, loan, or any other possible type of financing, you should know that checking your credit is a must, and is done by the lender, who is usually a credit card company or a bank. This occurrence is triggering an insight into the credit history in order to prove if you are qualified. When it comes to hard inquiries, their impact on your credit score is minimal. Usually, they are just taking off a couple of your points and they usually count 10% of your FICO score. Let’s say that you are on a quest of obtaining a new credit card. Most likely, it would be easier for you to apply for several credit cards at once and see if you are going to qualify for it.
If you would like to get help removing credit inquiries from your report, please visit this link: CreditRepairCompanies.
The Conclusion
We’ve provided you with all the necessary information regarding removing credit inquiries from your credit card report. The chance of this happening is not small, so you need to make sure you are prepared if it happens. Also, we explained how hard credit inquiry can affect your credit score. This is not that could always be problematic, but it doesn’t hurt to be ready for it or prevent it.
As you could read in this article of ours, you can request a removal from the company that you dispute or you can write to credit bureaus and have them investigate these irregularities. There is literally nothing that you should worry about during these processes because you are perfectly within your rights and you can check credit reports as many times as you want.
