Besides rewards for missions and upgrades to get Respect boost, there is one major thing you can do to maximize Respect earned during the run (so you can buy certain upgrades earlier). To put it briefly, it involves deleting save data from your PC every time you start a run (maybe a bit tedious, I know).

If you played/ran this game for quite some time, you might have noticed that certain actions (killing gang members, etc.) rewards cash instead of respect. This happens whenever you maximize respect earned for a certain action (e.g. you earned X respect total for “Gang Kills”, “Head Shots”, “Aircraft Kill”, etc.). For some reason this info stays in the save data even if you delete your save files in-game. In fact, this is the only known NG+ effect (at least to me) that carries over even if you reboot your game. To reset this, you will have to wipe your save data from the save game folder on your PC.

For Steam, it’s “[Steam install folder]\userdata\101441265\55230\remote”.

However, deleting all contents of that folder also resets your game settings (controls, etc.). To avoid this, delete all your save data, load the game, change the controls and other settings to the ones you desire then quit the game. This will create the “sr3DEF_PROFILE” file that contains all your settings data. Keep it somewhere on the desktop or in another convenient place so you can quickly replace all your save data with that file after you start a run.