I am new to the boards, so I'm sorry if this has been asked.
But why in 4th does it say that you can no longer have more than one Life-style?
My husband runs it like that doesn't exist, but I was wondering if there is a reason for it.
It makes sense to me to have more than one place to hide out if you are a Shadowrunner.
And I have read many of the novels (they helped me to learn English better), and some characters seem to have more than one place.

There are now optional Lifestyle rules in Runners Companion. This includes Multiple Lifestyles on p. 159 of RC.

While SR4, and SR4A, do limit you to a single lifestyle purchase, you could rent a safehouse as needed which supposedly takes care of the major reason you'd have another lifestyle.

Welcome to Dumpshock.

As long as you all agree, there's nothing wrong with multiple lifestyle purchases.

I like multiple lifestyle purchases, if you can afford them that is...

I think part of the problem with multiple lifestyles, according to the SR4 core rules, is that they include various expenditures that probably wouldn't overlap. You can only eat so much in a month, but two or three lifestyles includes food used. With the alternative lifestyle rules, it breaks lifestyle down into Comforts, Entertainments, Necessities, Neighborhood, and Security. You can vary each of these aspects of lifestyle to suit your needs. For instance, if you have one lifestyle at middle, you could also take a workshop as a second lifestyle with 0 in Comforts and Entertainments, and enough Necessities, Neighborhood and Security to run and protect the workshop. A simple safehouse might have Comforts at 2, Entertainments at 1, Necessities at 2, Neighborhood at 1, and Security at 3. I like the options and variations of the alternate system. It helps ground a character in the setting.

I Agree... which is why I so like the options in the Runners Companion for advanced lifestyles...

As a GM, I would be more liberal with the rules for starting players. I like the idea that maybe a character is in a great neighborhood, but inside the house, services are turned off and the all the furniture has been sold. Of course, the player will have to amend the situation, or move, but both of these would add some plot options. The rules would slowly tighten as the game went on, until things crash down on the player that hasn't resolved money matters on the homelife.

i quickly learned the value of buying more than one lifestyle, but since i havent even had a peek at 4th ed yet i had no idea about the new lifestyle options. looks like ill have to procure the shadowrunner's companion and see how well i can make it work for 3rd.
thanks for the heads up on that one

Runner's Companion has the expanded lifestyle rules for SR4, but for SR3 you can use the Sprawl Survival Guide. The rules aren't quite identical (there are different costs on the tables, for example), but they're close.

Good luck finding SR3 books, though. You can get a PDF, but hard copies are hard to come by.

Thanks for the answers, guys.
We'll look for that book.

wow, I'm suddenly glad I hung on to my SR3 books

Wish that I still had mine...

I have my stack of ed1,2,3. I just don't have any players.

I think that multiple lifestyles should be allowed, maybe twinking the rules, for exmple in the advanced lifestyle rules from Runner's Companion the Necessities cover water, gas, electricity, matrix, food, space, living conditions (the roof that does leak, the thermal insulation, etc.), etc., assign to each one its rating based on its quality, add them all together and divide the result by the number of categories that Necessities have been divided into (rounding up) obtaining the Necessities rating, if you are not using that lifestyle put the food rating to zero and calculate the lifestyle cost in standby mode; this would be doable for all the lifestyle categories.