Let me preface this post by saying I am often wrong. This may be another one of those cases.
If I were going to sell, I would sell now. The market has been on fire for a good while now and, contrary to popular belief, that's the time to sell, not hold. The reason I think this is that there are some conditions going on that won't last forever, especially COVID which has limited people's travel and many of us have used the time to focus on our collections.
I would put the higher end stuff together and sell through a good auction house the charges no commission. If your cards need graded, they can fastback that and they will give it a lot of exposure which should result in a better price.
You could sell your more ordinary cards on your own and do fine. You can easily research eBay comps and offer them here at about the same price and you should do well. Ebay is also viable as are some Facebook groups. Put them in logical chunks to minimize your work (for example, you'd probably want to sell the Mantles and key players/rookies separately unless you had a near set, but if you have 150 g-vg 1956 commons, it's a lot less work to sell them in one lot than indivudiullay.
There's nothing wrong with bulking out a portion to a dealer, you'll just get a lot less that way. Still, they will do the work and they deserve to make a buck.
If you wait until later, there's nothing wrong with setting up at a show or two as well. it's fun, but table fees, meals, etc. take a lot of the $.
I liquidated a large collection for a friend a few years ago. I made some mistakes, but I learned a little. I wish I had to do it over again and I'm also glad I have it done. We ended up with about $60K for his daughter's college.
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