Fantasizing, man? Now listen the real story. I survived 2 currency crashes, when savings of the whole 2 generations of the family were effectively nullified overnight. The euro is now damn close to such crash, and the US dollar as well. From my exp and from the good advice of my granny, I can only tell you to invest into good tools, safety matches, soap and food stash. Everything else is just fiction.
Well, the retirement savings are somehow (directly or indirectly) invested into a stock market, so they are safe from inflation, or even complete currency crash. When inflation is high, you even benefit, because people's consuming activity increases as there is little they could do to save money which is being burnt with inflation, so they spend, improving the bottom line of the companies they buy stuff from - and stocks of which you have. Or they buy stock directly, increasing real price of stock directly by increasing demand.
That is valid even in the case of extreme inflation - like 1923 Germany. People suffered, but stocks didn't.
Only exception from that rule was the 70s oil shock, but that wasn't a real crisis (economy itself was doing just fine, only the oil became expensive for purely external political reasons).
Any pension was lost? Yes stock market collapsed and so the savings on some funds which invested into stocks. But now they have nearly completely recovered, and 3 years which have passed is too low for a planning horizon for pensions. Last 10 years have been turbulent for stocks, with market (and overall economy) performing well below long-term average, and yet, dividends included, index funds post a modest profit over 10-year period, inflation-adjusted (in part that was because the inflation was low).
Out of curiosity, which currency crashes were these? I would not have my money in the bank if I was in Greece today, but I have most of my savings in stocks anyway, globally distributed...so it doesn't really matter.
The Soviet rouble, and the Latvian rouble before the LVL currency established.
Just curious, will you still have access to your stocks if the Internet collapses?
I'll still technically own them, but I'll have to access my broker (which is located in my own country) by some other means, i.e. telephone, mail or physically showing up at their office. About 50% of my stocks are owned through a very large fund, which mainly operates by mail anyway. I guess the stock exchanges themselves will at least attempt to stay open in such a scenario; it will probably be chaos but the stock market is at the basic level just a list of orders, which could in principle be sorted manually. Or at least without an internet connection. But you'll still own your stocks as long as there is a paper trail _somewhere_, worst-case you might not be able to sell them for a while.
If the internet became unavailable for a long time, it would be a very interesting situation regardless...during a calamity like that, you might be better off having all your money in real estate or other physical goods.
