For me, the disconnect was between the gig's pay and our starting living conditions:
Data Source:
One month prepaid lifestyle at Studio Apt and Generic Prepak
That's 1,800eb/month, implying that we semi-regularly have been pulling in enough to meet that and our other expenses.
However, I just dove a little deeper. In the absence of fixer gigs, our weekly income is in the tables on pp. 382-385. With our Rank 5 role abilities, our average would be 217eb/week for Kentucky and Whisper and 200eb/week for Lube. Monthly (assuming a four-week month), that comes out to 868eb and 800eb, respectively. So each month, each of us would need to be picking up one typical job (1keb) or two easy jobs (500eb each) just to make ends meet - more in months with bad rolls.
With that in mind, 1k each doesn't actually seem entirely off-base. One of the tenets of the fiction is that edgerunners (indeed, most people) exist perpetually on the edge of financial disaster. What we might want to do, however, is negotiate for expenses.
And loot the bodies.
(ETA: Also, we are getting netrunner support for this, which is probably coming out of the total outlay.)
This message was last edited by the player at 19:03, Sun 03 Jan 2021.