Well Kept Wallet 2025 Scholarship Winner

Congratulations to Emily Jarecke, our 2025 Scholarship Winner. Below is her essay, printed with permission.

“And the winner of the 27th Annual High School Rock Of is….INERTIA!” 

The announcer’s voice created a fat wall of sound in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, where, just a few weeks ago, my band had opened the competition on the main stage. Clad in our black and red sparkling dresses, the all-girl band took the stage hoping for the 3000-dollar prize. But my band’s name was e Little Ditties. 

In our dinky, run-down basement where we practice, we were drooling over the idea of 3000 dollars and what it would do for our band. We could replace the sound system we blew out playing heavy metal breakdowns, afford a new carpet that wasn’t stained with cat vomit, or even a new set of T-Shirts to sell at our shows across Cleveland. 

It was difficult for four girls in high school to control our band budget, especially as we tried to record an album (which required additional costs of snacks and drinks along with the studio time). In the midst of our studies, we were managing the money for merch, equipment, travel, and recording, as well as paying mediocre photographers to take blurry pics of us on stage. We brought good crowds and made a few handfuls from venues, but with our thriving popularity, 3k would push us to the forefront of Cleveland’s presenting bands. 

So as we walked away in defeat of Inertia, our pockets were empty. We had missed our winter formal for this opportunity! And now we were losers. Broke losers, at that! 

e next month we met on a Saturday morning for a “budget meeting.” We had decided to escape our basement and crowd a local coffee shop with muffins and espresso over our odd arrangement of notebooks and half-working pens. While Inertia was now rolling around in their penthouse (haha!), we were back to the drawing board for how we could afford our upcoming endeavors. e band decided to list out our most important expenses: the studio recording, merch, and travel costs. We knew we had to save before we upgraded our gear. is did, however, mean less Taco Bell runs after practice—saving is about NOT spending the money you make. 

As the next months flew by (and our snacks became less frequent) we realized that some of our money had disappeared. Lana, our bassist, had a brother who liked to hang around in the basement. He happened upon our pile of cash tucked away and swiped some—like, a hundred dollars! 

After that, we invested in a little pink safe tucked away in the bottom of the merch box. We thought it was money well spent. 

Shows passed, and we saved as much as we could, making two separate trips out to the recording studio once we could afford them. It was hard work, and each of us had to pour in lots of our personal time and energy into making the project come together. We compromised on a lot of things; instead of outsourcing people and services, we did a lot of our stuff in-house, like investing in a screen so we could

Emily Jarecke 

print our own T-Shirts. We stopped hiring photographers and accepted only what we could do ourselves or what another volunteered to do. We also took better care of our equipment because having anything else break would be bad. Every bit of gear in that basement, we used to thrive. 

Being a musician, outside of being generally about, well, music, is also about making conscious decisions about where your money is going. If you know you need new strings this month, maybe set aside thoughts about that shiny new tuner you were eyeballing. at was pretty much the Little Ditties mantra so that we could afford the things we needed. 

After months of hard work, labor, and hungry bellies, we managed to record our entire album through Akron Recording Company. We had MP3s in our band’s Google Drive of each of our original songs, ready for mixing, advertising, and listening from people as far as we could get it. It was work that we were genuinely proud of—not just because of the sound but because of the decision-making and self-control that had gotten us there. 

And as we met up as a band for the next practice after, we readied our instruments for more—and then the bass amp fizzled out. And it was back to the drawing board.