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In the literature on material conditions and poverty, researchers often use current income to approximate the economic situation of individuals despite the fact that there are many arguments why income at a certain point in time might be a poor reflection of material well-being. For practical reasons, income-based indicators are favoured over those based on the level of expenditure or assets mainly because of the difficulty of collecting such data, and such indicators are favoured over subjective measures of poverty because of the perceived lack of reliability and comparability of these measures across individuals and population groups. As suggested, among others, by Adena and Myck (2014) and Nolan and Whelan (1996), income-based measures may be particularly poor proxies of material conditions among older people. Additionally, these measures are problematic in the context of international comparisons. On …