Absa loan payment break

My wife and I have lost our income and have been making plans to cover our expenses for over a year now, we have unfortunately ran out of plans to make money for now and have agreed to ask for a personal loan break from Absa as we are afraid of getting a bad credit rating due to failure to keep up with the repayments.

They have told us that they don't offer that option and can only do an arrangement once we have defaulted on the payments. I explicitly explained to the person who was assisting us that we don't want any troubles with debt collectors being on our back, hence we came to the bank before we can be on the negative side with them. Our account is up to date as of now and we really didn't want to have any problems with them regarding this.

I'm disappointed as to how they don't understand that we sometimes go through financial stresses as people and would require a payment break with possible interests on the loan to avoid bad credit score with the credit bereau.

I for one don't understand why they wait for you to default then you make payment arrangements, instead of them having a payment break option with all the possible security checks being done.