Equipable Item meshes

I have been looking into different ways to attach my equipable item meshes to my character when they are equipped and am having trouble figuring out the correct approach. The way that makes sense is to spawn actor and attach it to the hand socket of my character. However my meshes are all static meshes which cant be attached to a skeletal mesh. I read that you can add each static mesh as a child component of the character skeletal mesh and then just make it visible when its equipped but this seems like it could be performance heavy if I have a lot of different item meshes following my character around all the time. The other option is to just make all my static meshes skeletal meshes even though they dont need to be. Is there some other option I’m missing or are one of those the correct approach??