Allan Rolnick's (taxcoach) Blog

 Turn the dial on the Wayback Machine to 1849, and join us in California, where "there's gold in them thar hills!" Two kinds of people are getting fabulously rich. Obviously, there are the prospectors, grabbing their shovels and racing for the latest strike. Then there are the shovel sellers gett...

 Twenty years ago, sci-fi fans geeked out to a new thriller called The Matrix following a dystopian vein established in Blade Runner, Total Recall, and The Terminator. It starred Keanu Reeves as "Neo" and Laurence Fishburne as "Morpheus": freedom fighters in a world where machines have trapped hu...

 October is chock-full of obscure holidays and commemorations. October 3 is National Boyfriend Day. October 15 — the real personal tax filing deadline — is National Grouch Day. (Coincidence? We think not.) October 19 serves up National Seafood Bisque Day (which sounds a lot tastier than October 2...

 The French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau once said that if a man is not radical at 25, he has no heart — and if he's still radical at 45, he has no head. And while Clemenceau focused his attention on the battlefields of World War I, history supplies an endless number of stories where radical...

 Here in the United States, we spend a lot of time arguing about income taxes . . . who should pay, how they should pay, and how much they should pay. Right now, the average American forks over 13.5% of their income in individual income tax, and 30% of their income in federal, state, and local ta...

  It can be a stressful experience preparing your taxes and filing them. It can be even more stressful however, if you make these mistakes that land you into tax trouble. It's important to remember that if you make mistakes that are serious enough, you might end up triggering an audit of your tax...

Every fall, in one of nature's enduring miracles, birds fly south for the winter. The Sterna Paradisaea , or Arctic tern, flies as far as three times the distance between the earth and the moon in a lifetime. The Branta Canadensis, or Canadian goose, flies 3,000 feet high at 40 miles per hour and...

 Reddit's r/relationships forum is one of the internet's favorite soap operas. Posters sum up their angst in a snappy shorthand: "I (22M) have fallen in love with the woman I serve (21F). I left to seek my fortune. But now she thinks I'm dead so she agreed to marry a pompous jerk (30sM). How do I...

 Chances are good that sometime soon, you'll find yourself in front of a football game. Love it or loathe it, from now through early 2020, the game will dominate the airwaves, to the point where, if you can't sleep at 4AM, you can find an ESPN channel somewhere featuring a bunch of aging ex-jocks...

Burning Man" is a celebration of creativity and community that pops up for nine days every year before Labor Day in the Nevada desert. (Turn right at Reno, go about 100 miles, and when it looks like you're actually driving on the moon, you're there.) It started as a simple bonfire for a handful o...