hi hi

When you consider how little the runners would make taking legal jobs, even 10k starts to look like a lot of money. However, the longest running game I was ever in lasted until about 55 karma. In the world at large though, business leaders tend to make between 10 and 20 times more then average workers (with the United States being an astronomically gigantic outlier) so I could see 10k for beginners and upwards of 100k for top of the line runners.

One still needs to be careful so that players don't say "I buy a fake SIN, 100 years worth of lifestyle and retire"

Buying a lifestyle is the monthly cost x100. Since their going to want at least high (seriously, who buys low lifestyle to retire on?) that is a cool one million. Plus they'll need money set aside for things like new Commlinks, new car, etc. All the stuff not covered by lifestyle. If you figure a 5% return on investment, work out a rough amount per year, add 10~20% (for slow growth/counter inflation), and multi it by 20. Add that to the million.

So if our runner wanted to retire with High Lifestyle and have another $5k @ month ($60k @ year), your looking at needing to save up 2.32 to 2.44 million total to retire. I'm not to worried about it happening until the players are ready to retire their characters (less likely then them all ending up dead in a firey blast)