Target Deal Days is coming from July 11-13, 2022 – Target’s equivalent of Amazon’s Prime Day. Last year, Target ran much better gift card deals than Amazon did, giving great discounts and high purchase limits on a wide range of gift cards.
If you have a Target RedCard, that’s an opportunity to save even more because it gives a 5% discount (albeit forgoing credit card rewards.) The only exception when it comes to gift cards is that you don’t get a 5% discount when buying Target gift cards – only third party gift cards.
If you have a debit card version of the RedCard and are planning on using it for this year’s Deal Days offers, it’s worth checking your account now and verifying the checking account details that your debit RedCard pulls payment from. This is important because it could save you hundreds of dollars in bank fees.
The reason why is because when you buy multiple gift cards in the same transaction, Target takes payment for each card individually – even when you’re buying multiple cards for the same brand and denomination. Let’s say you buy 5x $50 Choice gift cards, 5x $25 Dave & Buster’s gift cards and 5x $100 Apple gift cards in the same transaction. Rather than processing that as one payment or even three payments, you’ll end up being charged for those cards in 15 different transactions.
While that’s not a problem in theory, it can prove to be a problem when paying with a RedCard. If the checking account backing your RedCard doesn’t have a sufficient balance, you could be hit with dozens of overdraft fees which is what happened to at least one reader in the past.
I checked my backing account a few days ago and had to change it because that account only has ~$500 in it. I’m hoping Target’s Deal Days will provide the opportunity to spend at least four figures on profitable gift card deals, so I swapped it to an account that has plenty of money in it to cover whatever deals come along.
Deals could start at 3am ET on July 11, so it’s best to have this sorted out ahead of time as the best deals could sell out quickly and so you don’t want to be faffing around with changing the backing account once those deals are available.
Stephen, Thanks for the info but I’m confused. Is the Target RedCard both a debit card and a credit card? I have the latter. Or is there a version of the RedCard that’s just a debit card and that’s what you are referring to in your post? Thank you!
Yes, there’s a debit card version and a credit card version. This post only relates to the debit card version – I’ll make that clearer in the post.
Another issue is that I had a citi offer that required me to spend $50. Target charged several smaller amounts multiple times and I had to call to manually get the citi offer approved.