Best MA 'Beach Cities' To Live

Most people would never think about living by the beach beyond their daydreams. It sounds expensive, tough to maintain, and just a different lifestyle. But in Massachusetts, you're never too far from a beach, meaning you're never too far from a city or town on the water.

WalletHub put together a list of the best beach cities and towns to live in ahead of this weekend's heat wave. It's certainly not a perfect list, but in using several factors the personal finance website came up with the best 161 "beach towns" to settle down into. Here are the eight made the list in Massachusetts:

• 27. Swampscott
• 51. Newburyport
• 67. South Yarmouth
• 69. Salem
• 88. Gloucester
• 90. Revere
• 115. Lynn
• 122. Hull

The rankings don't indicate where the best beaches or views are - click here for those - but rather things like affordability, weather, safety, economy, quality of life, health and education. Other factors, like whether the beach has a large seasonal tourist attraction or whether climate change makes it too risky for a long-term investment, are up to you.

Swampscott, which placed 27th in the country, has the fourth-lowest housing costs of all the communities WalletHub looked at. Swampscott also had the highest percentage of insured population of them all, while Newburyport finished second.

Education and health played well for many of the high-ranking Massachusetts communities. South Yarmouth finished sixth in it, while Swampscott finished 10th, Newburyport 11th, Gloucester 12th, Revere 16th, and Lynn 17th.

Some other nearby towns that made the list were 12th-place Portland, Maine, and 21st-place Brunswick, Maine. In Rhode Island, Newport placed 78th, Westerly was 109th, and Warwick was 137th.

Laconia in New Hampshire was rated the 25th-best beach town by a lake in a separate ranking.

Here are where all the beach towns ranked by WalletHub can be found.

Photo from Rick Ando, Magazine Beach