This weekend only: Target’s big annual gift card sale

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in the rearview mirror, but the deals haven’t stopped just yet. In fact, this weekend only, Target will offer a Target gift card sale.

On Saturday, Dec. 2 and Sunday, Dec. 3, Target gift cards are 10% off in-store and online with a one-time-use Target Circle discount.

From milk and bananas to clothes, luggage, toys and home furnishings, Target is the one-stop destination for almost everything. It’s pretty hard to go wrong buying a Target gift card whether for yourself or someone on your shopping list.

If you know you’re likely to regularly shop at Target for the foreseeable future, buying discount gift cards now also helps you meet a minimum credit card spend to earn a credit card sign-up bonus. That way, you’ll meet the deadline for the earning spending bonus and save money on Target purchases over time. If you have some Toys-for-Tots type purchases to make and donate, these gift cards can make it easy to stretch those donation dollars 10% further, too.

To take advantage of the kick-off to the holiday savings, you’ll first need to activate the offer in your Target Circle account. This limits the number of discounted gift card transactions to just one per account. You can purchase smaller denomination gift cards up to the $500 discounted max or one $500 gift card, as long as it is all in one transaction with the Target Circle offer activated.

A few restrictions apply:

• Limit one offer per guest to purchase Target gift cards online or in-store.
• One transaction can include multiple Target gift cards up to $500 ($50 maximum discount).
• Offer excludes Visa Gift Cards, Mastercard Gift Cards, American Express Gift Cards and gift cards issued by other retailers, such as dining, lifestyle and entertaining gift cards.

If you want to increase the value of this deal, you can pay for your discounted gift cards with a Chase Freedom Flex via the PayPal checkout option on the desktop Target.com site.

If you haven’t already maxed out your $1,500 toward Freedom Flex’s 5-points-per-dollar bonus categories for this quarter (including PayPal), you should earn 5 points per dollar spent on this purchase (activation is required).

With this, you can buy a $500 Target gift card for $450 and earn 1,350 Ultimate Rewards points (or $27 at current valuations of 2 cents per point) via PayPal with the Freedom Flex card. If you also have a premium Ultimate Rewards card, such as the Chase Sapphire Reserve, those 2,250 points you’ll earn are worth over $46, according to TPG valuations. That totals $96 in savings/earnings on a $500 purchase.

This is beneficial if you would spend those dollars over the coming weeks and months at Target anyway. Finally, going through a shopping portal before clicking on the Target website is also good advice, though gift card purchases are typically excluded from earning cash back.

Additional reporting by Jennifer Yellin and Melissa Klurman.