Yeah. This happened to me. My particular angst was charity, and not a travel fund, but the dialogue was similar. I started to deeply resent the reduction to my savings rate. Not fair! Not fair!
I assume it's because any community you choose to become a part of will, eventually, begin to change your values towards the larger gestalt. You start to believe the message. Then you internalize the message. Then you start to judge your actions and personality against the message. Often the change is a force for good, but sometimes it moves people away from something they truly to cherish of value.
It's easy to tell yourself you'll only take the positive parts of a message, and ignore the unhelpful part, but I don't think our brains actually work that way without conscious intervention.
So do you still deal with this? How do you deal?
Did you still make your charitable contribution?
I made my peace with the tension, and continue to donate 10% of my net salary to charity.
On good step was to switch from calculating savings rate, to the % of gross pay I actually needed to live on. For better or worse, I'm incredibly competitive, and I seeing a savings rate that was 'only' in the 40's made me feel like I was losing the competition. I started to really resent just giving that 10% away. Reframing the calculation to show only 35% of my gross pay goes to lifestyle immediately made me feel like I was winning the competition again. As in -
suck it MMM forum, I send 65% of my pay to something besides supporting myself. Note, I'm not saying this is a great part of my personality, but at least I know how to game it for maximum happiness, right?
Second step, I stopped reading the Anti-Mustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy. That seems to be the sub-board where the uglier parts of our community are allowed to run a little too free. Letting myself browse that sub-board was creating neuropathways in my brain that were not beneficial to me, encouraging me to judge the world against a set of values I hadn't fully vetted inside my own brain.
Once I took those 2 steps, I was able to view the situation with more distance. The distance allowed me to reassert that charity was part of my personal moral code. Once I had that puzzle piece, choosing charity and ignoring the MMM communities ideas on the issue was simple. I could no longer give a single fuck.
So, I guess your travel fund is another of those examples where knowing your own values. If this place is changing your values, and you don't like the change, then you need to switch something up. I'd love to tell you exactly what, but I think that can only come from your own brain. Personally, I found a lot of happiness once I resolved the tension, because it was a process that taught me a lot of things about myself. So, MMM has increased my maturity, in a kind of ass-backwards way.