Personal Finance Tracker – Protecting Routes

Welcome to Part 5 of the Personal Finance Tracker series! In this session, we’ll implement route protection to ensure only authenticated users can access sensitive parts of the application, such as the dashboard and financial data pages.

This step builds on our Clerk authentication setup and enforces proper access control across the app.

✅ What You’ll Learn in This Video:
✔️ Understanding public vs protected routes
✔️ Protecting pages using Clerk’s authentication guards
✔️ Redirecting unauthenticated users to the sign-in page
✔️ Accessing user session state inside protected routes
✔️ Best practices for securing finance-related pages

💡 Why This Step Matters:
🔹 Prevents unauthorized access to personal financial data
🔹 Ensures a secure and trustworthy user experience
🔹 Mirrors real-world security practices used in production apps
🔹 Strengthens the overall architecture of your application