Financial Literacy

About This Gathering

The Apartment Café is a women-centric community space designed to feel warm, familiar, and welcoming — just like being invited into someone’s living room. Each month, we set up a shared table with baked goods and drinks contributed by the women attending. Everyone brings something small — whether homemade or picked up along the way — and together we create a relaxed, café-style atmosphere. We pour coffee, make a plate, settle in, and talk.

Theme

This month, we gathered around Financial Literacy. Money — how we earn it, spend it, fear it, ignore it, and occasionally make deeply questionable decisions about it. We talked personal finances, investing, assets, liabilities, and the deeply humbling question of why we are the way we are about money.

Details

The Invitation

The Apartment Café is back for the month of May, and I hope you would invest in coming to this session — especially if you are a girl who just wants to have fun. And yes, allies, this is your invitation too.

This May, we gathered around Financial Literacy with our speaker, Amira Berrada. Amira is a member of the IFC Emerging Asia Fund, has navigated emerging markets at Citigroup in New York, and holds an MBA with distinction from Columbia Business School and the University of Hong Kong. In short, she is the person you want in your corner before you make another questionable financial decision.

She brought that wisdom to our table. We talked personal finances, investing, assets, liabilities, and the deeply humbling question of why we are the way we are about money — broken down by life stage: student, single, dating, married, and everything in between. Because apparently “treat yourself, you deserve it” is not a retirement plan. We also got into the red flags. Some of us related very much. It was fine. Probably.

Discussion Summary

The conversation was so rich, so honest, and so surprisingly funny that by the end of it we had already decided: there will be a Part Two, this time specialised in investing. More on that soon.

Thank you to everyone who was in the room. And a very special thank you to our precious Amira, who gave so generously of herself and her knowledge.

“Thank you Bayan for organizing such a wonderful afternoon! I learned a lot from everyone and loved hearing the different perspectives.” — Amira

Reading List from Amira

For anyone who wants to keep the conversation going, here are Amira’s favourite personal finance books:

• Smart Women Finish Rich — David Bach
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad — Robert Kiyosaki
• The Richest Man in Babylon — George S. Clason
• The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel
• The Art of Spending Money — Morgan Housel
• The Simple Path to Wealth — JL Collins

A Special Announcement

This gathering also marked a milestone for The Apartment Café: we officially launched The Tote — our first physical object, made with love and designed to carry more than just your things.

Alongside it, we unveiled the Lily Wilson x The Apartment Café postcard — a limited edition print featuring original artwork and a quote by Lily, who understood this space from the very first moment.

A huge thank you to Shaya Marran for helping photograph the products and for modelling — you were a dream.

Photos