There are two main types of inquiries that affect your credit score. Soft and hard inquires differ in the way they do it, but both can have a negative impact on your credit scores. A soft inquiry is when you check to see what's going on with your own finances or get an offer for something like insurance - this type doesn't count against you at all because there was no financial transaction involved. The one thing people don't realize about these is that checking out another person's public records could be considered a violation of their privacy rights if done without permission! A hard inquiry occurs whenever someone checks up or tries to borrow money from banks looking into how good they would make as customers (these still go onto our reports). These will stay