Judging from your description, the life of a researcher actually suits you very well. It is not true that if you carry on in Science, you will never hit 100k per annum ceiling in your life. Personally, I'm a Life Science graduate and 3 years into my working life, I'm hitting mid 70k per annum. Give me 3- 5 years more and I'll hit >100k per annum (though I will be considered slow when compared to other peers in high end finance industry etc).

Since you're going to study overseas, my suggestion will be to do sci, then further your studies to do PhD. Once you graduate, go do Post-Doc in one of the ivy leagues university for a few years, publish in good journals, and you can then try for tenure at universities. By then, your starting salary per month would have hit 5 figures already.

You won't need to work in office, you'll face your experiments more than anything, and you can be working on what you're good at.