Before I begin, as it is apparant that Lily is a mod on 20dayajarnforum with her tongue unpleasantly far up LDMA and kenkannif's arse, her replies, which will no doubt flow, can be predicted.
Reading Bangkok Phil's recent comments about his trip back to the UK, it is apparant that he longs to live back there, and yet by spending the best years of his life working as a TEFLer in Thailand, any chance of ever earning enough there to be comfortable as a middle aged man has long passed.
Then there is 20dayajarn.com. This was run as a hobby and a source of information and support for teachers, but Phil saw good reason to exploit its popular position. It thus became run for his benefit alone, via the advertisers. I'm not saying that some of the information written isn't valuable, but the way it is slanted, i.e. to purely promote TEFL and TEFL schools, stinks.
If Phil was a decent and honest person, he would want to warn people about the pitfalls of throwing one's life into being a TEFLer in Thailand. But that would be shooting himself in the foot, financially wise.
He is not only in a position where he chose to spend the best years of his life in a country mainly because he was able to earn more than those around him (unlike in the UK, where he obviously struggled to earn even an average living) and thus have (extremely poor) people wait on him -what a fucking colonialist!, but he saw fit to ensure it was financed mainly by Western money, by using the site to suck people in to the sponsors, not actually caring if they ended up trapped like him.
All that mattered was that as he had thrown away his chance to live in the UK ever again, he was going to make himself as comforable in Thailand as possible, by whatever means necessary.