so I tried a different approach still using sym but it is a bit labor
c = [-1*ones(3,1); 0.3*ones(5,1); 0.6*ones(6,1)];
n = length(c);
syms N(r)
N(r) = c(1)/(1+r)^(1-1)+c(2)/(1+r)^(2-1)+c(3)/(1+r)^(3-1)+c(4)/(1+r)^(4-1)...
+c(5)/(1+r)^(5-1)+c(6)/(1+r)^(6-1)+c(7)/(1+r)^(7-1)+c(8)/(1+r)^(8-1)+...
c(9)/(1+r)^(9-1)+c(10)/(1+r)^(10-1)+c(11)/(1+r)^(11-1)+c(12)/(1+r)^(12-1)...
+c(13)/(1+r)^(13-1)+c(14)/(1+r)^(14-1);
the following answers don't really give what I want here