Models of post-main sequence stellar evolution of VandenBerg & Bell have been applied to determine spectroscopic masses and distances for metal-poor stars. Careful consideration of the most important error sources published in more recent papers such as VandenBerg for the first time allow us to draw firm statistical conclusions. It is shown that the evolutionary calculations qualitatively fit to the observed stellar parameters whereas quantitatively they predict too high ages for metal-poor stars. As an important result we confirm that evolutionary sequences need to be calibrated with respect to their metal abundance in order to use their absolute predictions of temperature and luminosity. In our spectroscopic analyses the strong dependence between surface gravity and abundances determined from Fe I lines restricts the accuracy of Fe abundances in subgiants to 0.1 dex at best. The most remarkable result of our evolutionary and kinematic investigations of halo stars refers to the large fraction of slightly evolved subgiants among the so-called subdwarfs. Since conventional photometric approaches often assume that the great majority of metal-poor stars are dwarfs this results in distances that are systematically too low for their samples.