There are so many terms that go into keeping and maintaining good credit that it can really be hard to stay focused on the end goal: getting out of debt at all costs. One set of terms that comes up often is hard and soft inquiries. If you’re not in the know, you might be confused at what they are and more importantly, which one can hurt you and which one cannot.

Soft inquiries are not going to hurt your credit report at all. Inquiries are simply checks into your credit report. However, hard inquiries are the type that are initiated by other companies that are trying to assess whether or not they’re going to grant you a financial product of some kind. It could be insurance or credit cards or even a home loan. Either way, these are inquiries that tend to affect your score.

Soft inquiries come into play when someone wants to check your credit on your behalf, like a credit score monitoring service. Your employer checking in your credit is more or less going to be a soft inquiry as well. They want to make sure that you are not a financial risk to them. They feel that the lower your credit score is, the more likely it is that you could be tempted into either selling corporate secrets or otherwise damaging the company in some fashion.

Soft inquiries also happen when you get pre-approved for a loan or a credit card offer. These inquiries will never hurt you score — ever.

The hard inquiries where lenders are looking to figure out whether or not they want to extend credit to you are the ones that hurt your score. However, it’s important to remember that these inquiries only hurt your score a little bit. If you really want to shop around for an auto loan, it’s better to do that than worry about losing a few points.

The inquiries will fall off your credit report after two years, but their impact is lessened after 6 months or so have passed.

You also don’t have to feel like you won’t ever be able to find out if a company is going to do a hard inquiry (hard pull) or soft inquiry (soft pull). They will tell you if you ask, because it’s a common question that gets asked. There are other consumer sites that try to build databases of how companies handle this type of processing.

Mortgages tend to always be hard pulls, as well as student and auto loans. Personal bank loans will also tend to be hard inquiries. Car rentals can go either way — which is why it’s very important to ask them up front if itís going to be an issue.

If you already have credit monitoring set up, you might do some inquiries and then see how it really affects your score. The impact could be a lot less than you think!