You go to the bank, deposit your paycheck and walk away thinking your money will remain safe and secure, ready for you to withdraw whenever the need arises.

But as Greeks have discovered, that's not necessarily the case. In the event of a crisis, you may not be able to access your money.

According to a Guardian article, some officials in the Greek government were prepared to take a page out of the Cypriot playbook and confiscate funds from banks.

Some members of Greece's leftist-led government wanted to raid central bank reserves and hack taxpayer accounts to prepare a return to the drachma, according to reports that highlighted the chaos in the ruling Syriza party.”

“In a separate report in the conservative Kathimerini newspaper, Varoufakis was quoted as saying that a small team in Syriza had prepared plans to secretly copy online tax codes. It said the ‘plan B' was devised to allow the government to introduce a parallel payment system if the banks were closed down.”

While it remains unclear how serious the threat to Greek deposit holders actually was, the scheme certainly wasn't just a far-fetched conspiracy theory. During the crisis in Cyprus, the government essentially seized 47.5 percent of any funds over 100,000 euros in all the personal accounts of the nation's two largest banks.

Greeks seemed to have dodged that bullet, but even absent a so-called “bail-in,” they still labor under the burden of a cash crunch. Banks completely shut down for about three weeks, and even today, depositors can only withdraw 420 euros a week. Capital controls are expected to last for months to come.

With access to cash severely limited, a thriving barter economy has quickly developed. It seems almost primitive, but it has become a matter of survival for a Greek farmer named Mimis Tsakanikas interviewed by Reuters.

Squeezed on all sides, the 41-year-old farmer began informal bartering to get around the cash crunch. He now pays some of his workers in kind with his clover crop and exchanges equipment with other farmers instead of buying or renting machinery.”

“Tsakanikas is part of a growing barter economy that some Greeks deplore as a step backward from modernity, but others embrace as a practical means of short-term economic survival.”