How do you find a home moving consultant who can help you plan a move?

My husband and I want to relocate. We own our present home outright, but we’ve never bought a house together before. By now we’ve been in one place for so long—decades—that we have a huge amount of stuff to deal with (and purge), and we don’t know the best order of steps for purchasing and vacating. We pretty much don’t know anything except the area we want to live in, which is about 45 minutes’ drive from our present address.

Where do we start? How do we find someone who can help us plan? Where do we find honest muscle for the physical parts that we can’t handle? We’re not just talking about packing and loading; there has to be a lot of sorting and disposing, and we’re not physically up to it. We need lots of help.

First, though, we need information.

If you have relevant experience, or know how to find reliable support (and can give us a rough ballpark on cost), you could give us a major assist.