The value of my time

I recently had another credit card compromised. I only use this particular card at two on-line bookstores, so I'm fairly sure how it was compromised.

In any event, someone got my card information and charged a few months of membership at Skype India. When I pointed out these charges to my bank they immediately took care of the fraudulent charges, but I was still left with $0.36 in foreign transaction fees that I was charged for the fraudulent charges because they were made outside the US. The fraud people explained that I would have to talk to a different division to take care of those charges and gave me the number to call to take care of the problem.

After calling the second number, I was transferred around a bit and then put on hold. After being on hold for a couple of minutes I just gave up and decided to pay the $0.36 in fees instead of waiting on hold even longer.

After thinking about this for a while, I realized that I just provided a way to estimate how much my time is worth. If I'm willing to pay a $0.36 fee after 3 minutes, that seems to say that my time is worth about $0.12/min or about $7.20/hr, which is slightly less than the minimum wage in California.