For more than four decades, Anthony Lee Cantu, RSSA, CAPP, CPC, has built a career in financial services around one central responsibility: helping individuals, families, executives, and business owners make informed decisions about their wealth and the financial future they are working to create.

As Founder of Core Private Capital Partners, Anthony brings a perspective shaped by extensive experience across financial planning, investment advisory services, securities, insurance, consumer and mortgage banking, retirement income planning, wealth management, and executive leadership.

A Career Built Across Financial Services

Anthony entered the financial services profession at the age of 23, beginning his career with Norwest Financial in consumer lending. That early experience provided a foundation in personal finance, credit, lending, and the financial decisions facing individuals and families.

His career soon expanded when he joined Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MetLife). His work with Metropolitan introduced him to a broader financial services environment encompassing life insurance, financial protection, retirement considerations, and the increasingly complex financial needs of individuals and families.

As Anthony’s practice and experience developed, he expanded into securities, investments, and financial planning. He became associated with First Financial Planners / FFP Securities in Chesterfield, Missouri, where his work further broadened into securities and investment-related financial planning.

Anthony subsequently became associated with Royal Alliance Associates, Inc., a New York-based securities and investment advisory firm. These relationships provided additional depth to his experience in securities, investment planning, portfolio strategies, and comprehensive financial services.

It was during this broader period of his career that Anthony’s entrepreneurial vision continued to develop, ultimately leading him to establish Core Investment Advisors, a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA).

As founder of Core Investment Advisors, Anthony created an independent registered investment advisory practice centered on comprehensive financial planning, investment guidance, and the belief that sound financial advice should begin with understanding a client’s complete financial picture rather than with any single investment, insurance product, or financial transaction.

Anthony’s career subsequently extended into additional areas of banking, finance, management, and entrepreneurship.

He served in management with Wells Fargo Mortgage and later owned and operated an Allied Home Mortgage Capital net branch, gaining substantial experience in mortgage banking and the secondary mortgage market.

Anthony later expanded his career through his relationship with Homesteaders Life Company, an institution with approximately $6 billion in assets. During a five-year period, Anthony distinguished himself as one of the company’s leading revenue-producing executives in the United States.

During his work with Homesteaders, Anthony’s experience included more than 1,200 advanced-planning LITs, representing a significant body of work within the advanced funeral and pre-planning marketplace. His work in this area further broadened his experience in life insurance, advance planning, client education, protection strategies, and helping families prepare financially for important life events.

His relationship with Homesteaders continues today and remains part of his broader professional portfolio.

Media & Financial Education — South Texas Radio

From 2020 through 2025, Anthony hosted a financial radio program on KBFM 102 FM, reaching listeners throughout South Texas. Broadcasting two one-hour programs each week, he focused on end-of-life financial decisions, advance planning, and the importance of preparing families before important decisions became urgent.

Over its five-year run, the program provided hundreds of hours of community financial education. Anthony also personally responded to listener calls and inquiries, often continuing those conversations individually with families seeking guidance and planning assistance.

The experience further reinforced a principle that has guided Anthony throughout his career: informed financial decisions begin with education, preparation, and planning ahead.

More Than 3,000 Client Relationships

Throughout a financial services career spanning more than four decades, Anthony has worked with more than 3,000 clients and families across a broad spectrum of financial needs.

Those relationships have encompassed securities and investment relationships, money management, life insurance and protection planning, mortgage and lending transactions, comprehensive financial planning, retirement and retirement income strategies, Social Security planning, asset protection considerations, and estate and legacy planning.

This breadth of experience has allowed Anthony to work with clients through many different stages of their financial lives—from protecting families and accumulating assets to building wealth, preparing for retirement, transitioning from a paycheck to retirement income, preserving accumulated capital, and ultimately considering how wealth can be transferred from one generation to the next.

Those experiences have reinforced one of Anthony’s fundamental beliefs about financial planning:

No important financial decision exists entirely on its own.

Investment decisions affect retirement income. Retirement income can affect taxation. Social Security decisions can influence portfolio withdrawals. Insurance can play an important role in risk management and wealth transfer. Liquidity can influence investment decisions. Estate considerations can affect how assets are owned and ultimately transferred.

For Anthony, those more than 3,000 client relationships represent considerably more than a career statistic. They form the practical foundation of the financial planning philosophy he brings to clients today.

Professional Education and Designations

Anthony has continued to expand his professional education throughout his career, particularly in areas relevant to retirement, Social Security, asset protection, and advance planning.

He holds the RSSA® — Registered Social Security Analyst® designation, reflecting specialized education related to Social Security claiming strategies and their role within a broader retirement income plan.

Anthony also holds the CAPP — Certified Asset Protection Planner designation, complementing his experience in financial planning, wealth preservation, and asset protection considerations.

His CPC — Certified Pre-Planning Counselor designation reflects additional professional education and experience in advance planning and its associated financial considerations.

These specialized areas of education, combined with more than four decades of practical financial services experience, contribute to the comprehensive perspective Anthony brings to each client relationship.

The Evolution of Core

Anthony originally established Core Investment Advisors as a Registered Investment Advisor many years ago. His career subsequently took him through additional chapters of financial services, banking, mortgage finance, insurance, management, and entrepreneurship.

Today, he has returned to the original vision behind Core with considerably greater experience and a broader perspective.

Core Private Capital Partners represents the next generation of the financial planning and investment advisory practice Anthony originally established through Core Investment Advisors.

The firm’s work today is centered around three principal areas: wealth management, retirement income planning, and strategic career exit planning.

Anthony has developed a particular focus on helping successful professionals, executives, business owners, and individuals approaching retirement navigate one of the most consequential financial transitions of their lives—the transition from a career and a regular paycheck to financial independence and retirement.

Anthony refers to this as Career Exit Strategy.

A successful career exit involves considerably more than selecting a retirement date. It requires understanding how accumulated assets, employer retirement plans, investments, Social Security, pensions when applicable, insurance, taxes, income needs, estate considerations, and other financial resources can be coordinated to support the next stage of a client’s life.

Through Core Private Capital Partners, Anthony helps clients address some of the most important questions surrounding retirement:

How much is enough?

When can I confidently leave my career?

Where will my retirement income come from?

Which assets should I draw from first?

How should my portfolio change as I move from accumulation to distribution? How can taxes affect my retirement income?

How do I structure the wealth I have accumulated so that it can support both my retirement and the legacy I ultimately want to leave?

For Anthony, this transition represents a fundamental shift in financial planning:

During your career, you work for your money. At retirement, your money must begin working for you.

That is where Anthony’s experience in wealth management and retirement income planning comes together.

Through Core Private Capital Partners, he develops comprehensive financial plans designed to coordinate retirement income, Social Security, investment considerations, insurance and risk management, tax-aware planning, asset protection, estate and legacy considerations, liquidity, wealth preservation, and intergenerational wealth transfer.

Anthony believes a well-designed career exit strategy should provide more than a retirement date. It should provide a financial framework for turning a lifetime of accumulated assets into a purposeful, sustainable strategy for the years ahead.

Financial Planning and Wealth Management

Through Core Private Capital Partners, Anthony works directly with clients to develop comprehensive financial plans centered on their individual circumstances, priorities, objectives, and long-term vision, with particular emphasis on wealth management, retirement income planning, and career exit strategies.

Anthony also serves as an Investment Advisor Representative with AdvisorShare, through which he provides investment advisory and wealth management services.

This relationship allows Anthony to integrate comprehensive financial planning through Core Private Capital Partners with investment advisory and wealth management services through his affiliation with AdvisorShare.

The objective is not simply to manage money.

It is to give that money direction—and to help clients confidently transition from the career that created their wealth to the life that wealth was intended to support.

Capital Should Have Purpose

After more than four decades in financial services, Anthony’s philosophy has increasingly centered on a simple principle:

Capital should have purpose.

For one client, that purpose may be growth. For another, it may be creating dependable retirement income. For a business owner, it may mean converting decades of business success into personal financial independence.

For another family, the priority may be wealth preservation, tax efficiency, estate and legacy planning, charitable giving, or transferring wealth to children and grandchildren.

And for many individuals approaching retirement, the question ultimately becomes remarkably simple:

Have I accumulated enough—and how do I turn what I have built into an income I can confidently live on for the rest of my life?

Anthony believes that is where financial planning becomes deeply personal.

Markets change. Interest rates change. Tax laws change. Financial products change. Technology changes. But the fundamental responsibility of an advisor does not: understand the client, understand what their wealth is intended to accomplish, and develop a disciplined financial strategy around those objectives.

After more than four decades in financial services and more than 3,000 client relationships, Anthony remains passionate about sitting across the table from individuals, families, executives, and business owners, listening to what matters to them, and helping them bring greater clarity, structure, and purpose to their financial lives.

For Anthony, the establishment of Core Private Capital Partners represents both a return to his entrepreneurial roots and the next chapter of a vision established many years ago.

Core Investment Advisors has evolved.

Today, that vision continues as Core Private Capital Partners.

Plan with purpose. Retire with confidence.