Before you qualify for a loan or a credit line from any source, the lender will be sure to check your credit history. When you receive "pre-approved" credit card offers in the mail, you can be sure that the company offering you the card has checked your credit first. If credit check s or inquiries are run too often on you, however, it can damage your credit history and limit your ability to borrow money or be charged a low interest rate. There are two types of credit checks or credit inquiries and only one of them has any effect on your credit history. Those credit inquiries that you authorize (when you apply for a loan, mortgage, or revolving credit) appear on your credit report and affect your score. Your credit score will get lower each time you apply for credit. Since credit inquiries can affect your credit score negatively, you should try to keep the number of credit applications you fill out to a minimum. That does not mean that you shouldn't shop around for the best loan opportunity. Similar credit inquiries (like for a mortgage or auto loan) that are pulled within a particular time frame, around 30 days, will be counted as just one inquiry. Companies finally realized that shopping around was a good thing and they quit penalizing the smart consumer because of it. The other credit inquiries are those made by business that you have not authorized to get your information. Anyone with a permissible purpose (defined by the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act) has the ability to check your credit history ? without you even knowing about it. Companies that have the legal authorization to run a credit check on you include retail stores and credit card companies. They want you to open credit lines with them, so they do credit inquiries in order to offer you preapproved cards. Even though these credit checks do not affect your credit history, they do appear so that you can find out who has been inquiring about your credit. Prospective employers may also pull your credit history, and this is another type of inquiry that will not affect your credit score. All credit checks done by businesses are reported so that you can be aware of them. Only the credit checks that you authorize by applying for credit lines and loans are able to damage your credit history.
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