Personaly, I think 20 K is entirely reasonable to pay for an A cat. If you don't want to pay that much feel free to pay much less initialy and buy into a different class. I think a more important question is what are the yearly costs of owning an A cat. From my experiance, owning a Nacra 6.0 was much more expensive per year to maintain in good shape and race then my A cat. In fact this last year was the cheapest year of sailing I have ever done( except for my old dart 18) on a per day of sailing basis.
What I would suggest is that you sail an A class Catamaran. If after sailing one, you are willing to go back to your old boat, don't buy one.
Personaly, I am done with overweight, poorly built, multihulls mass produced with bad steering and cheep fittings.
