It's entirely plausible to expect Internet access in a certain geographic region to be unavailable for days, possibly weeks, in the event of temporary anarchy. Everyone here understands how regulation and economic forces can devastate a society, sending it back significantly in terms of technology and standard of living.
I think the best way to deal with this is to have a small amount invested in physical precious metals, like one ounce gold and silver rounds. These are more readily spent if there's no electricity and the local currency collapses.
PM are not really a solution in the near term, as the vast majority of people have zero practical experience with silver or gold coins, in order to recognize them when they need to. It's relatively easy to create credible fakes of gold plated tungsten while the lights still work that would fool 98%+ of the population after the lights go out. This condition would last for months, until people began to figure out how to recognize the fakes; and until then most people simply aren't going to trust some guy with gold coins. Silver has less of a problem here, and is useful in other ways for disinfection, etc, but most people aren't going to have need for silver anyway. Barter items, such as common firearm caliber ammo, are better for the near term. Bullets are already money anyway. They are made of several commodities, are themselves useful, come in common units, are readily recognizeable to those who might wish to trade them, and any one is pretty much interchangeable with any other, and they don't rot.
